Electronic Book Review - james joycehttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/tags/james-joyce
enMcElroy's "Letter"http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/anacoluthon
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
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<div class="field-item even">Charles Molesworth</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-08-23</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>The American poet Charles Olson once advanced a theory, called <span class="lightEmphasis">Projective Verse</span>, that included claims about the nature of the sentence. For Olson, the sentence was ineffective, because it could never fully reflect the process of thought. The sentence as produced in English grammar was especially deficient in this regard, Olson theorized, because its sense of action and its verb tenses were limited. What we can see, however, in Joseph McElroy’s <span class="booktitle">The Letter Left to Me</span>, is that the English sentence has more flexibility at imagining and recording thought processes than Olson would perhaps have admitted. It is at once important to say that the novel uses the traditional device of interior monologue, but does so in a way that is especially sensitive to the movements and relationships between and among the thoughts - and the processes of thought - of the first person narrator.</p>
<p>Just a word of further introduction before I look at the novel in some detail. McElroy’s work overall is best seen, I believe, in the tradition of what I would call the post-Joycean novel. <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/all-over">[see William S. Wilson on McElroy’s field, eds.]</a> On this view, Joyce’s <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span> is the commanding model of modernist fiction, and its authority comes from the way it extends the poetics of naturalism by its skill in creating a symbolic web in which naturalistic detail can flower. Eliot’s seminal essay on <span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span> and myth, and Robert Martin Adams’ study, called <span class="booktitle">Surface and Symbol</span>, set out the terms of what I consider the best reading of Joyce as the originary figure of this tradition. Added to Eliot and Adams’s readings, I would also mention phenomenology, that is, the concern with states of interiority and their structuration in and through the intentionality of consciousness. What this tradition rests on most solidly is the use of well-made sentences. Grammar and style in this tradition are more than mere pyrotechnics; they become the measure of veridicality, in a way that combines psychological and aesthetic standards of accuracy and appropriateness. The sentences do not just tell the story; they measure it.</p>
<p>As for the novel itself, in consonance with its traditional rhetorical presentation, <span class="booktitle">The Letter Left to Me</span> proceeds in a somewhat deceptively simple manner at the level of the events narrated. The story centers on a letter written by the narrator’s father and meant to be read by the narrator only after the father’s death. Virtually a model of propriety, the father is a Wall Street investment consultant, socially and financially secure, who wears a Chesterfield coat and a Derby hat. The mother is a gifted decorator with a high sense of color, who enjoys a poetic sensibility and a talent for playing the piano. The narrator, for his part, is a high school senior when his father dies. The young man loves both his parents, is still a virgin, and is eventually accepted into a fairly elite college (but not Harvard, which is where his father graduated). The action takes place in 1946-47, and spans, roughly, the time from the father’s death shortly after Christmas, until the opening weeks of the narrator’s first semester in college. In terms of ostensible subject matter, then, the novel depicts a representative family drama centered on the thoughts of its youngest member as he goes through a significant rite of passage, in short a <span class="foreignWord">bildungsroman</span> in a thoroughly American idiom. Yet the novel is not at all like the traditional American domestic melodrama, so beloved by Hollywood and the mainstream audience for best-selling fiction.</p>
<p>Much of the complexity of the novel results from the young man’s thought processes, which are rendered in a naturalistic way - full of sudden shifts in attention, logical and illogical connections, recurring images, and so forth. But the curve of the thoughts, their very texture is clearly what McElroy is after. The feel of thinking, we might say. This feeling might strike some readers as distant and detached, especially in a first reading. The narrator seems a bit too cool, even when confessing to his adolescent awkwardness, and his world appears almost too verbally sophisticated to be emotionally convincing. But like all good sentences, the novel itself must be read at least twice. In a second reading, what we notice is the level of attention that the narrator gives to the events and thoughts leading up to and occasioned by the letter. More important, perhaps, we notice that this attention, doubtlessly felt as detached in the first reading, is not only psychologically appropriate as the young man’s way of coping with his grief, it is also the register of the growth of his affective wisdom, his coming to know that the “how” of what we experience is as important as the “what” or “why.” <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/parallel">[see McElroy on 9/11, eds.]</a></p>
<p>The central focus of the book’s action, the father’s letter, is at once ordinary and strange. The letter itself is never given in full all at once; nor does the narrator ever sit down and read it, or at least no such reading is ever recorded in the book. (The narrator, incidentally, is never named in the story, by himself or others. This reticence is more than a stylistic device, as it bespeaks the sense of privacy that we share with him.) The contents of the letter, as we are able to slowly and inevitably reconstruct them, are fairly predictable - heartfelt advice about working hard, realizing one’s potential, just the sort of sound and necessary advice that fathers are supposed to give sons, but which often gets overshadowed by the press of mundane events - what Shelley called “the slow stain of the world.” What lifts the letter beyond the mundane and the mysterious, however, is its dissemination. This process interweaves the gradual - or staged - making public of the letter with the young man’s maturation and socialization. This dissemination, then, applies not only to the letter but to the father’s incarnated version of himself in the narrator, and the narrator’s coming to terms with his own createdness, or to use an even more phenomenologically oriented word, his “thrownness.”</p>
<p>This interweaving of the fate of the letter and the fate of the narrator gives the book its formal beauty. Recall the article by Joseph Frank, “The Spatial Element in Modern Literature.” Frank argued that the great modernist texts were meant to be visualized, in a reflective and even meditative sense, as possessing a spatial form. This spatialized form resulted from such devices as the use of collage and complexified narrative “lines,” and as such offered the main aesthetic contribution of modernist poetics. McElroy’s formal invention in this novel produces an especially striking instance of spatial form. Because the letter is referred to again and again, but each time in a different context, and because this recursive use of the letter’s words - as well as the conditions of its making and sharing - shape the central thrust of the narrative, the best image for the spatial form of the novel is that of two intertwined Moebius strips. The Moebius strip, as we know, is a two-dimensional strip that has been turned and rejoined to itself, so that it has only one surface and one edge. (Indeed, the image of two intertwined strips will recall the double helix that models DNA. McElroy may even have had such a possible visual form in mind, as the knowledge of modern science, especially biology, is pervasive in his fiction.) <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/violent">[see Andrew Walser on McElroy and science, eds.]</a></p>
<p>One of these strips represents the letter; the other represents the narrator’s growing self-awareness. The first strip can be visualized as representing the father’s actual written words to his son, and the words as they are made increasingly public. The narrator is entangled in trying, against all odds, to separate these two dimensions of the letter; in fact, one of the last scenes in the novel has the narrator trying to recover printed copies of the letters from his classmates dorm rooms and wastebaskets, like Isis trying to gather the limbs of her brother. As the letter’s contents are increasingly “publicized” they induce in the narrator a need to understand his own place in the world, and to come to terms with what Henry James called the “awful devouring publicity of life.”</p>
<p>The other strip also has a single surface that represents two aspects: the boy’s thoughts as he generates them to himself, and those thoughts as we overhear them, so to speak, in the form of the sentences in the novel. In each case - the letter and the boy’s thoughts - two apparent dimensions have been melded into one, and these two “single” surfaces intertwine as the father’s letter and the boy’s thoughts inter-animate each other. The narrator is constantly trying to clarify his new found sense of identity - or the new threats to his identity - both of which would be precarious in any circumstance, but given the death of his father, the continuing presence of the paternal voice in the letter makes all such clarification doubly difficult. Each strip, then, represents the unfurling of a process, and the two processes eventually become the same. The letter left to the narrator is the genesis of the novel and the ontogenesis of the narrator’s selfhood. <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/magpie%20mind">[see Alicia M. Miller on McElroy and private history, eds.]</a></p>
<p>This “visual” feature takes us into one of the main elements of the book’s style. I refer here to the sense of the audience of the book - of course, not just its actual readers, past and present, but its virtual audience as it is imagined and thus created by the narrator. This audience is manifold, in part because the novel convincingly uses the interior monologue in such a way that the book at times seems to rest on the assumption that the young man desires to have no audience whatsoever. Like “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” before it, the narrative of this story of social threat and personal unease is true only if told by the one who suffers it; yet the conditions of the story and its narrator would seem to insist on total privacy, that is, on total silence. The novel thus explores, among other things, the phenomenological space between our thoughts and our words. McElroy’s sentences are rich with the felt textures of that interface, or liminal area, between the said and the unsaid, and this richness makes the liminal a major thematic concern of the novel.</p>
<p>But instead of having no audience, the book has at least three. First, there is the narrator, who listens to what he himself says, but not always perfectly. As he says at one point, “I’m building backwards,” which means more than that the action is told retrospectively, but also that he is building his sense of self by a back-and-forward motion among not only his thoughts but the habitude of his thinking. His poiesis becomes his ethic.</p>
<p>The second audience is the young’s man father, as the narrator tries to answer what his father has written to him - by keeping alive the imagination of his father’s voice, by trying to imagine where his father is now that he is dead, and by trying to see for himself what his father’s words mean. The narrator’s father is “replaced,” in a figurative sense, by several other characters in the novel, especially “Pop,” who is the narrator’s step-grandfather. Pop had married the narrator’s paternal grandmother after his grandfather died, when the narrator’s father was only twelve years old. Thus, the novel represents that classic instance of a doubling of the narrative, as one generation’s loss gets repeated in the lives of those who follow. The narrator’s growing tenderness towards Pop, and his increasing ability to accept the other members of both sides of his family, is a key element in his maturation. This maturation is facilitated by the narrator extrapolating from his knowledge of his father’s way of treating family members; he must learn to answer to his father’s values. Again, the poetic making of the novel’s plot is exactingly appropriate to the narrator’s ethical growth.</p>
<p>The third audience is, of course, us, since the young man, by the mere act of making sentences, is implicitly making them for someone, someone who shares the grammar - the formal structure and capabilities of the language - in which those sentences occur. <a class="internal" href="/endconstruction/topoanalytic">[see Steffen Hantke on McElroy and structure, eds.]</a> The narrator’s increasingly flexible way of remaining accurate to the nuances of his feelings, even as he is trying hard to clarify those feelings and not resort to either platitudes or mystification, is also part of what leads him towards maturity. A shared grammar of communication serves to anchor, even as it problematizes, a world of social maturation. We especially need a second reading in this regard, and what at least this reader can attest to is that the narrator sounds considerably more grown up the second time around. This reader response attribute causes the novel to seem like a titanic struggle between rendering justice to the phenomenological structure of the present moment and yet “building backwards ” as a way of solidifying the narrator’s sense of being in the world. The novel captures so well the way one person thinks that we are restrictively involved in a very private experience, yet as with Stephen Dedalus, we come to see the inner logic of even the most potentially annoying personal traits.</p>
<p>Much of the formal complexity of the novel occurs at the level of the sentences, their stylistic pliability and inventiveness, their stylistic answerability - if I can adapt a phrase from Milton. But this complexity has its simplifying balance in the straightforward chapter structure of the plot of the novel. This plot shows us the letter in each of the book’s five chapters, and each chapter marks a further dissemination of its contents and possible significance. First the letter is given by the mother to her son (she has retrieved it from a desk drawer in the family apartment, almost casually); the second chapter shows us the remaining family members and close friends who read the letter. The third chapter narrates how the letter is further circulated, beyond the nuclear family, to friends of the family in a printed version arranged for by the step-grandfather. One of these friends is a teacher at the narrator’s high school who mentions it to one of the students at the school, which introduces the letter into the narrator’s peer group. The fourth chapter has the letter circulated to the narrator’s college classmates by the Dean of the College, as a model of virtuous advice; and the fifth relates how the narrator tries to ascertain what his classmates make of the letter, and he eventually shows it to a young woman whom he meets for the first time when she comes to visit a friend of his at the college.</p>
<p>At each stage of public exposure, the letter’s author is more anonymous (the college version of the letter goes unsigned, for example), and this adds to the narrator’s challenge in specifying what the letter means to him. The ever-enlarging audiences for the letter show the narrator how the dissemination of meaning is conditioned by all the elements of context. The dissemination also serves as a subtle, almost invisible metaphor for the narrator’s own enlarging contact with the worlds of society and memory. Such dissemination is felt as a threat in some ways, and yet the boy’s personal reserve, his desire for privacy, slowly adjusts to the circumstances of loss and presence as his father’s voice slowly becomes unvoiced and yet reiterated as a general social code.</p>
<p>As I say, all of this is encoded, if you will, into the structures of the sentences in the novel. Let me offer just the opening sentences of the novel as a paradigm of what I have been arguing. As the novel opens we read:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The woman holding, then handing over the letter to this poised, dumbfounded fifteen-year-old: is the letter also <span class="lightEmphasis">hers</span>? She’s been busy, her hands are anything but idle here in a room of a city apartment, but today what belongs to her hands? The words are echoey-bare - a room, a city apartment - they sound rugless, not yet moved- <span class="lightEmphasis">in</span>, don’t they? - which is not this place at all. (3)</p>
<p>Every phrase is bearing its weight here. Notice the pivot between holding the letter and handing it over, the first act of the novel and one laden with the threat and promise of transferal. The young man is also balanced on a pivot, between poise and the inability to react. The sentence resorts to anacoluthon, as the opening indicative turns into an interrogative. Questions of property (and propriety) and what we can and should hold on to as ours, are thematically and grammatically posed. Then self-reflexiveness rushes in as the narrator questions the appropriateness of his own words, words that at once tell his story but seem to unhouse him from familiar surroundings. And the passage ends with a dialectical realization of where the narrator is by virtue of a moment of estrangement. Each of these points will be thematically completed several times over in the novel.</p>
<p>What stands out from the passage is the way it not only questions itself but answers those questions, so that we are not left with a miasma of ambiguity but rather a richly imagined welter of facts and near facts, even non-facts, such as words that sound “echoey-bare” or “rugless.” The phenomenological accuracy of the perceived world is both driving the structure of the sentences and serving as the poetics of the action. McElroy has mastered this style of writing in several works, perhaps most impressively in <span class="booktitle">Plus</span>, his science fiction novel about a brain that begins to grow a body. The style has a micro-level accuracy, but it also develops certain distinctive macro-level attributes as well. In a way, McElroy is bound by Pound’s dictum, “the natural object is always the adequate symbol.” But this allegiance frees him to fulfill the dictates of naturalism so that he can create larger patterns of symbology at a more abstract level. As I have argued above, the novel is exploring the thematics of maturation and privacy, as well as identity and dissemination, with the symbols - which are classically resonant - of a paternal bequest in the form of a written document.</p>
<p>Grammatical analysis might shed some additional light here, but I suspect only a little. For example, the opening phrase of the first sentence - “the woman” - looks as if it should be the subject of the sentence. But the question “is the letter also <span class="lightEmphasis">hers</span>?” renders the first part of the sentence into a noun clause. What began as a sentence about self-possessed control becomes instead a question about dubious ownership. Later, the phrase “the words” might at first be taken to refer elliptically to “her hands,” but by referring instead to “room” and “city apartment” they make the metaphor of “echoey-bare” have a phenomenological accuracy that gives the figure of speech an almost literal sense. The themes of the novel are thus present as part of the way the sentences uncoil and conclude, only to be sent off at different vectors in what follows.</p>
<p>Having started with the opening sentences of the novel as an example of its style, let me close with the ending of the book.</p>
<p class="longQuotation">I am wild, in my haste, and I will live a new life. The letter is everywhere and I can’t answer for it. I’ll answer the letter. I can’t. But I will. (152)</p>
<p>Here I think I hear an echo of Robert Frost, whose monologues could serve as a very useful introduction to McElroy’s melding of psychology and syntax. At the end of “Home Burial” you may recall the husband is intent on restraining his wife’s emotional reaction - and imminent departure - because of the death of their son, and the man’s apparent coldness of manner in burying the child’s body. The poem ends with the same two words that end McElroy’s novel. The contexts are in many ways obviously different, but the two word phrase - “I will” - signals in both texts not only an indefinite act of motivation and intent, but creates what Olson might well have called a “projective” moment, when the language of the book spills us back into the phenomenological world of uncontrolled dissemination, a dissemination of meaning and volition.</p>
<p>There is another echo in this brief passage, where the authorial voice closes by opening a new prospect, and affirms by denying, even as his denial conditions any possible affirmation. I refer, of course, to Samuel Beckett, whose words about going on and not going on are one of the central texts of modernist irony. It is not too much, I think, to see McElroy’s sentences as partaking of both Frost and Beckett as stylistic fathers. His fiction often has the plainspokenness of the New England poet combined with the dour lyricism of the Franco-Irish genius. What McElroy brings to his grateful readers as well is an engaging sense of story, that abiding recognition that the lives of people have common ground no matter how isolated they are in extreme moments. Thinking about this can take place in several keys. But thinking about it thoroughly, thinking through it, can only be registered in a great many well-made sentences.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/joseph-mcelroy">Joseph McElroy</a>, <a href="/tags/letter-left-me">the letter left to me</a>, <a href="/tags/plus">plus</a>, <a href="/tags/phenomenology">Phenomenology</a>, <a href="/tags/symbolism">symbolism</a>, <a href="/tags/dissemination">dissemination</a>, <a href="/tags/milton">milton</a>, <a href="/tags/bildungsroman">bildungsroman</a>, <a href="/tags/joseph-frank">joseph frank</a>, <a href="/tags/spatial-element-modern-literature">the spatial element in modern literature</a>, <a href="/tags/naturalism">naturalism</a>, <a href="/tags/naturalistic">naturalistic</a>, <a href="/tags/james-joyce">james joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/joyce">joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/ulysses">ulysses</a>, <a href="/tags/robert-frost">Robert Frost</a>, <a href="/tags/home-burial">home burial</a>, <a href="/tags/samuel-b">samuel b</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1094 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comDouglas and Hargadon respond in turnhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/antibinary
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">J. Yellowlees Douglas</div>
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</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2004-11-04</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-riposte-to field-type-node-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Riposte to:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/thread/firstperson/avecplaisir">The Pleasures of Immersion and Interaction</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>Maybe our culture is so saturated with binaries that we have difficulty avoiding them. Perhaps new media criticism seems to be skewed more heavily toward, say, hypertext fiction than videogames - the equivalent of the scholarly focus lavished on James Joyce while poor old Stephen King gets the academic equivalent of short shrift. But Henry Jenkins’ response projects a sort of elitist haute culture vs. lowbrow division in our article that, on close reading, doesn’t exist. We begin by describing problematic traditional assumptions, after which we describe a continuum uniting engagement, flow, and immersion. We’re interested primarily in the cognitive demands placed on us when we turn to entertainment, especially where these demands touch on familiar and unfamiliar cognitive schemas. The most contentious aspect of our definition - using “widely read” to describe people who prefer engagement in their entertainment over immersion - does not apply simply to books but also to videogames, cinema, television, music, and popular culture, most of which are hardly the stuff of haute culture. And, actually, our interests are skewed heavily toward the immersive: the first draft of our article contained a Freudian slip, “Immersion and Interactivity” for “Immersion and Engagement.” Truth be told, we’re fonder of immersion than of engagement.</p>
<p>Immersion doesn’t imply, de facto, formulaic elements; it entails, instead, the mapping out of clear-cut schemas, providing readers or users with a fairly clear map of the territory ahead. Further, our vision of engagement is a bit more active than Richard Schechner probably envisions, although he quite rightly points out that the interiorized experience of reading or playing an interactive game may seem relatively rich compared with the most impoverished texts – the knee-jerk twitch games, the Harlequin romances and genre fantasies. In our definition, engagement lies not in the number or nature of choices offered us but in the cognitive loads necessary to make sense of the experience confronting us. If we need to resort to extra-textual resources outside the text’s frame, we tend to be engaged; if we sink into a stupor that begins somewhere near Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief and rapidly damps out all perception of the world humming around us, we’re immersed.</p>
<p>We’d argue, moreover, that any medium can host texts that occupy spaces all over that immersion-flow-engagement continuum. Obviously, some genres get their effects - enjoy their juiciest sales - from their promise of immersion: ask any twitch player how much backstory she wants, and you’re liable to get a blank stare. Genre readers pay for the privilege of having their expectations satisfied utterly, right down to the twelve or eighteen red herrings salting the average mystery novel. Not surprisingly, digital technologies are already helping us create fresh schemas by melding together elements of what have been mostly separate and distinct schemas. Interactive shoot-em-ups, for instance, borrow heavily from video arcade schemas, requiring fast reflexes and well-honed eye-hand coordination but not necessarily a good eye for reading characters or a long memory for backstory’s ancient history. Simulation interactives, however, hover somewhere between immersion and engagement in the vicinity of flow, which may explain both their addictiveness and the accolades simulations like <span class="booktitle">Black and White</span> have reaped from gaming pundits. When you’re hunkered down with <span class="booktitle">Railroad Tycoon</span> or Sid Meier’s <span class="booktitle">Antietam!</span> or <span class="booktitle">SimCity</span> or, for that matter, <span class="booktitle">The Sims</span>, you’re engaged in building an empire or strategies or cities and scenarios, bound by the constraints of the game’s own time clock. And yet you’re also immersed, dealing with the other-world you’re creating as if it were real in an experience that is essentially open-ended: you can abandon it, leave and come back to it, continue adding to it, even leave things to their own devices and watch them run, a virtual <span class="foreignWord">deus abs conditus</span> peering down at a world of railroad robber barons and disgruntled Sims ready to rip one another’s eyes out, still developing and stewing hours after we’ve tweaked our last variable.</p>
<p>Our primary point in analyzing the aesthetic pleasures of interactives: we’re awaiting the eventual redefinition of entertainment itself, in terms of our schemas and scripts. Before the advent of interactives, you needed a detailed script for pure engagement but only a simple, austere script for pure immersion. To play chess or music in an orchestra or Australian rules football with a bunch of mates, I need to know a whole panoply of rules and regulations - what’s acceptable, what’s expected, what’s verboten. To watch a play or film or to read a book, I need only follow a relatively simple script:</p>
<p>1. Watch, or<br />
2. Read.</p>
<p>These scripts, however, are already morphing: playing any interactive game, for example, can require periods where we necessarily shift into and out of engagement mode. Some of Richard Schechner’s response, interestingly, itself describes both modes separately. When we follow Darryl Strawberry’s exploits on the diamond, we’re immersed. When we, however, track his story through rehab, remission, the courts, and seedy halfway houses, we’re engaged. Watching Maggie Smith play a repressed spinster in <span class="booktitle">Lettice and Lovage</span> or <span class="booktitle">Washington Square</span> is immersive. Pondering what Smith’s repressed spinster persona brings to <span class="booktitle">Washington Square</span> via <span class="booktitle">The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne</span> or <span class="booktitle">The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie</span> is engaging. What’s most intriguing, most promising about interactives is their ability to combine, to blur, and perhaps, ultimately, to confound these hitherto largely discrete modes.</p>
<p style="text-align:right"><a class="internal" href="/thread/firstperson/outgrowth">back to Hypertexts and Interactives introduction</a></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/james-joyce">james joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/stephen-king">stephen king</a>, <a href="/tags/henry-jenkins">henry jenkins</a>, <a href="/tags/richard-schechner">richard schechner</a>, <a href="/tags/freud">freud</a>, <a href="/tags/black-and-white">black and white</a>, <a href="/tags/railroad-tycoon">railroad tycoon</a>, <a href="/tags/antietam">antietam</a>, <a href="/tags/sim-city">sim city</a>, <a href="/tags/sims">the sims</a>, <a href="/tags/lettice-and-lovage">lettice and lovage</a>, <a href="/tags/washington-square">washington square</a>, <a href="/tags/lonely-passion-judith-hearne">the lonely passion of judith hearne</a>, <a href="/tags/prime-miss-jean-brodie">the prime of miss jean brodie</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1018 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comWriting the Paradigmhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/compositional
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Victor J. Vitanza</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1996-03-15</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>1. How do we not know we think, yet think?</h2>
<p class="epigraph">It is equally deadly for a mind to have a system or to have none. Therefore, it will have to decide to combine both.<br />
Frederich Schlegel</p>
<p>Gregory Ulmer (a.k.a. ‘Glue’) has been for some time developing a theory of invention that would be appropriate and productive for those cultural theorists who have an interest in electronic media. (Invention, classically defined in oral and print culture, is the art of recalling and discovering what it is that one would think or say about a given subject. In electronic culture, invention takes on new ramifications). In his <span class="booktitle">Applied Grammatology</span> (1985), Ulmer moves from Derridean deconstruction (a mode of analysis that concentrates on inventive reading) to grammatology (a mode of composition that concentrates on inventive writing); that is, he moves towards exploring “the nondiscursive levels - images and puns, or models and homophones - as an alternative mode of composition and thought applicable to academic work, or rather, play” (xi). Ulmer focuses primarily on a theory of invention in terms of these images and puns, which would lay bare associational thinking, co-incidences and accidents, yet non-disciplinary meaning. His anti-method of invention, therefore, moves from a linear, discursive production of discourse to a non-linear, hypertextual/multi-media production.</p>
<p>In <span class="booktitle">Teletheory</span> (1989), Ulmer rethinks a theory of genre that would complement his grammatological theory of invention. (Here, we can see that a theory of invention is an incipient set of genres; a theory of genres, an incipient set of aids to reflection about writing). Ulmer does for cultural theorists what Hayden White in <span class="booktitle">Tropics of Discourse</span> and elsewhere does for historians, namely, invites cultural theorists and historians to reinvent “doing” cultural theory and history as they are “doing” them. One of the genres that Ulmer develops is “Mystory”/”Mystoriography” (with variations such as history, herstory, maistrie, mystery, my story), which he sees as a post(e)-pedagogy. Freud, for example, wrote a kind of mystory when he developed self-analysis, psychoanalysis, not knowing what it was he was “doing” while he was doing it. The process of discovery in mystory is proleptic, with the question forever arriving out of perpetually re-answering it. This is composing as discovery. This is writing what will have been. The tense is the future perfect. Hence, the paradox, which Lyotard refers to as “the paradox of the future (<span class="lightEmphasis">post</span>) anterior (<span class="lightEmphasis">modo</span>) (<span class="booktitle">Postmodern Condition</span>, 81).</p>
<p>The genre of Mystory is especially appropriate now, for in many areas of cultural theory the subject (or the agent) that-would-presume-to-know what s/he is “doing” is no longer tenable. Another way of putting this is that whereas in a disciplinary age subjects-of-knowing were given ways of specifically “doing” work that would count as work, now in a non- or post-disciplinary age, subjects that do not know can nonetheless have a generic autobiographical protocol for writing (mystory) that can give birth to institutional practices for change. Ulmer does not have a substantial (sub-ject) life, and yet he does in the inventing of one or several lives woven together.</p>
<p>If I may give a quick example from the middle of Mystory: if we take my name <a class="outbound" href="http://www.uta.edu/english/V/Victor_.html">Victor Vitanza</a>, examine it carefully, etymologically and punningly, etc., we might get the following heuretic (grammatological) reading. Victor generally means “Conqueror.” Vita signifies “Life.” Anza signifies (in Italia) “Against.” My family name, Vitanza (the sub-stance of my Being) and its possible meaning, when thus disclosed, became rather disconcerting. The very idea that my heritage was against life! However, when I recalled that my first name signified <span class="lightEmphasis">conqueror</span> and put the full name together, “conqueror of death,” I begin to feel much better. Does it all stop here? No. It only rebegins. (This form of analytic reading goes beyond mere deconstructive textual analysis, for it is grammatological, i.e., compositional in its emphasis). When looking at <span class="booktitle">Finnegans Wake</span>, which is against death, I discovered that Joyce had <span class="lightEmphasis">invented mystory</span> before I was even born…as “Victa Nyanza” (558.28). ‘Tis a name that is echoed throughout the wake, signifying the origins of the Nile and the two great bodies of water from which the Nile arises: Victoria and Albert Nyanza (558.27, 598.5-6). Freud has his Nile; V.V. has his. You, yours. And yet, there is the pun on “Nyanza” as No Answer (89.27) in disrespect to origins and in respect to proleptic (perverse, reversed) thinking. The Nil/e is “soorcelessness” (23.19).</p>
<p>The connections continue to resonate. (With these possible connections in mind, my writing is propelled from paradigm to paradigm. It’s a matter of my connecting the linguistic dots and acoustical images of my/our lives and everything in them without predetermined sequential numbering. Knowing, knowledge, is up for grabs perpetually. So I have not only a deconstructive name but also and more importantly a grammatological name. You do, too!)</p>
<p>The <span class="lightEmphasis">third</span> book of Ulmer is the one that I am most concerned with, <span class="booktitle">Heuretics: The Logic of Invention</span> (I see the book as the lost locus of three, which ends or rebegins with three, as in the counting system of one, two, and three-as-“some-more,” i.e., as excess). This book more than the others carefully defines in terms of a theory of invention how “to play” on the road to Serendip(ity), while confessing ignorance of knowing what the rules of the game are. The “rules” are often referred to as the “impossible.” Therefore, Ulmer’s is “a Discourse against Method” (12) un/just as Paul Feyerabend’s is. But “against” here paradoxically means not only <span class="lightEmphasis">contra</span> to but also <span class="lightEmphasis">along side</span>.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span> calls for a return of “a rhetoric/poetics leading to the production of a new work” (4). (Rhetoric and Poetics in their battle with traditional philosophy have been the 2,500 year old straw wo/man! Hence, the return of the politically suppressed). But as an anti-methodology, heuretics is not concerned with critique or with “what might be the <span class="lightEmphasis">meaning</span> of an existing work?,” but with “a generative experiment: Based on a given theory, how might <span class="lightEmphasis">another</span> text be composed?” (4-5). In other words, as Ulmer explains, heuretics does not critique ludic discourses for not being political but calls for them to invent a (non-reactionary) politics (5). The principle of invention, then, is not that of saying what something is by virtue of what it is ‘not,’ but by way of affirming heretofore unacceptable connections. Heuretics is heretical (or her-ethical). Historically, women have been defined in terms of their lack of a masculine signifier, the phallus. Ulmer’s principle of invention, however, is an economy of thinking without reserve (lack), which would be a leap out of Oneness and binaries to threes-as-excess (see Derrida 258-60). Such a locus of thinking, reading, and writing fundamentally negates all the basic principles of (masculine) logic.</p>
<h2>2. An anti-model of how we will have thought:</h2>
<p class="epigraph">For me the number three is important, but simply from the numerical not the esoteric point of view: one is unity, two is double, duality, and three is the rest. When you’ve come to three, you have three million - it’s the same thing as three.<br />
Marcel Duchamp</p>
<p>One of the invidious tests in the academy for whether a notion or a practice has any value is whether or not it can be generalized (is generic, accountable) and whether or not it is transferable (codifiable, teachable). All of Socratic and Platonic thinking (dialectics) deals with the central question of whether or not something (justice, piety, virtue, rhetoric, etc.) can be taught. If not, then, it is a mere knack, irrational, and thus left to the forces of chance. I would hope that we are far from being ruled by this kind of thinking. Not all knowledge is objective; much is personal knowledge, as Michael Polanyi says: We can know a great deal more than we can articulate. Not all knowledge is to be determined by <span class="lightEmphasis">physis</span> or <span class="lightEmphasis">nomos</span> but also by <span class="lightEmphasis">kairos</span>, which as Eric C. White reminds us is a principle of “spontaneity and risk” (20). (Risk, we will ever return to!)</p>
<p>Ulmer, as I suggested, situates himself in the paradox of saying Yes twice to the text of his problem: to having a method (accountability) and not having a method (being unac <span class="lightEmphasis">count</span> able). This is his heretical act of negating the principle of non-contradiction and thereby allowing for the return of the excluded third. Ulmer may at times count from 1 to 10, but at other times he counts by way of 1, 2, “some more” (excess).</p>
<p>When accountable in his unaccountability, he gives us what he calls CATTt. (If you click <a class="outbound" href="http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~gulmer/gram1.html">here</a>, you will see Ulmer’s pictorial representation of CATTt). The acronym stands for</p>
<p>C = Contrast (opposition, inversion, differentiation)<br />
A = Analogy (figuration, displacement)<br />
T = Theory (repetition, literalization)<br />
T = Target (application, purpose)<br />
t = Tale (secondary elaboration, representability)</p>
<p>Ulmer boldly opens his book with the unfolding of this anti-method. (There is no way that I can summarize Ulmer’s particular explanation that is a brilliant performance. This is where exposition fails. You will have to read the opening pages yourself. And then you will be hooked. Your curiosity will only bring life to the CATTt and yourstory!) But I can point to a few generalizations about the heuristic. <span class="lightEmphasis">Contrast</span> is intended in a Sophistic sense; that is, it functions as the second part of <span class="lightEmphasis">Dissoi Logoi</span>, arguing in a perverse fashion for the opposite. When the dominant discourse becomes a Cartesian <span class="lightEmphasis">Discourse on Method</span>, for example, then someone like an Andre Breton can develop an anti- or counter-Cartesianism, or Surrealism, a ” ‘false discourse on method’ that would be [however] not just contrary to Descartes but completely different” (Ulmer 14). It is this pressing of the anti-method that can remove us from the simple opposite, or binary, out and beyond to something novel. Ulmer explains:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The strategy is heuristic, employing several ad hoc rules that require continuous decisions and selections (there is no ‘algorithm’ for this exercise). The chief such rule is to read the <span class="lightEmphasis">Discourse</span> at the level of its particulars - its examples, analogies, and evidence - rather than at the level of its arguments. The antimethod will break the link between the exposition and the abstract arguments that provide the coherence of the piece…Accept Descartes’s particulars, that is, but offer a different (for my exercise, an <span class="lightEmphasis">opposite</span>) generalization at each point, to carry the examples elsewhere, to displace them. The idea is to strip off the level of argument and replace it with an opposite argument that should in turn be made similarly coherent (secondary elaboration). (12)</p>
<p>In this way, Ulmer is able to say Yes to the text twice (both Descartes and Breton). The <span class="lightEmphasis">Dissoi Logoi</span> approach, however, is not limited to <span class="lightEmphasis">arguing</span>, for what CATTt stresses is <span class="lightEmphasis">poetizing</span>. Again, while Freud was developing (collaboratively) his notions of psychoanalysis, say with Dora, he on occasion spoke of being “hysterical” himself. Confused, he found himself writing fiction, poetizing (his guesses, his filling in the <span class="lightEmphasis">mise-en-abyme</span>) while simultaneously writing within the so-called scientific protocol that his colleagues demanded he follow. Freud says Yes to the text twice. (Unfortunately, he did not say Yes to both the Oedipal theory and, now more importantly, the Seduction Theory. CATTt would have invited him to practice such an affirmation of opposites and to search for third options).</p>
<p>By itself, the acronym of five conceptual starting places, CATTt, looks as if it overlaps with a number of other rather conventional sets of <span class="lightEmphasis">topoi</span>, for example, Aristotle’s 28, Cicero’s 16, Kenneth Burke’s Pentad (perhaps his four master tropes, which Hayden White uses), or Kenneth Pike’s and Richard Young’s tagmemic nine-celled matrix or any variation of it. However, Ulmer’s intention for its usage is very different. Whereas heuristics, or inventional procedures, focus more on <span class="lightEmphasis">topoi</span> as arguments instead of <span class="lightEmphasis">tropes</span>, Ulmer’s intention stresses the latter over the former. (As Ulmer progresses in his discussion, he introduces the term Chora to better suggest what the word <span class="lightEmphasis">tropes</span> cannot since caught in the binary of <span class="lightEmphasis">topos/trope</span>).</p>
<p>As I have said, Ulmer’s is not a conventional argumentative thinking and writing; his is a grammatological approach to thinking and writing, which emphasizes picto-ideogrammatic, aesthetic representations. Writing intuitively. The CATTt is the perverse side of Aristotle and perhaps should be seen also as an extension of Aristotle’s <span class="booktitle">Poetics</span>, but with the perverse addition of comedy over tragedy, so as perhaps to reach for a tragic-comedy, or joyful pessimism. Ulmer’s purpose - as I understand it - is not exclusively in support of the Left or the Right or what is far Left of what is humanly possible. Like a Sophist, he supports that which is not being said, the weaker argument or the supplementary notion, but with the purpose of passing out of the binary to excess. Ulmer introduces CATTt as a “modest proposal” in support of many methodologies, but especially those outside the dominant discourse: “to invent an electronic academic writing the way Breton invented surrealism, or the way Plato invented dialectics: to do with ‘Jacques Derrida’ (and this name marks a slot, a <span class="foreignWord">passe-partout</span> open to infinite substitution) what Breton did with Freud (or - why not? - what Plato did with Socrates)” (15). Such a proposal stands diametrically opposed to the academic protocol of writing (linear, hierarchical, cause/effect writing), which is bolstered by traditional heuristics.</p>
<p>Ulmer’s proposal looks toward “the logic of cyberspace” (hypermedia). Such a place (wherever it might be) can for certain be colonized as if it were a product of Euclidean typographic culture. Links might be made in terms of High Scholastic trees. The new logic is nonlinear, non-Euclidean, and is anti-tree, but rhizomatic. The choice of the former or the latter is not our choice in many ways, for the medium (hypermedia) as the message will change the conditions for writing, opening up new possibilities. The orientation toward product does become one of process, and perpetually so. But process is not to be studied for the establishment of a product. Process, situated in the future perfect, is everything.</p>
<p>The movement from <span class="lightEmphasis">orality</span> to <span class="lightEmphasis">literacy</span> is now rushing on to a third place, what Ulmer refers to as <span class="lightEmphasis">electracy</span>. And academic writing will have changed. Ulmer, in the midst of this change, is inventing practices that will invite us all to disengage in an unkind of writing practice that we are “inventing while [we are] inventing it” (17). The paradox and the avant-garde! Ulmer would have us practice “hyperrhetoric…which is assumed to have something in common with the dream logic of surrealism” (17). It is “a new rhetoric…that does not argue but that replaces the logic governing argumentative writing with associational networks” (18) Yes, those of us familiar with writing in the new media can easily understand that Ulmer is talking about Hypertext (extended texts) the way that George P. Landow, Jay David Bolter, and Richard A. Lanham have most recently. And yet, Ulmer would go beyond. And has.</p>
<p>Ulmer speaks of “chorography (the name of the method that I will have invented)” (26).</p>
<h2>3. Some More (“Esperable Uberty”/Xcess)</h2>
<p class="epigraph">Dexter: Oh yes, yes, yes!<br />
Sebastian: Funnier than that?<br />
Dexter: Oh, absolutely. Yes.<br />
Dexter: Now on the St. Louis team we have Who’s on first, What’s on second, I don’t Know is on third… Abbott and Costello</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Item:</span> Ulmer’s notion of place (the Where?), as I have suggested, is ‘the thing’ that has been systematically excluded. He, like Kristeva and Derrida before him, returns to Plato’s <span class="booktitle">Timeaus</span>, and specifically the discussion of the three kinds of nature: Being, Chora, and Becoming. The excluded is the Chora. The excluded third, or middle (muddle)….</p>
<p class="epigraph">In the buginning is the woid, in the muddle is the sounddance.<br />
James Joyce</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Item:</span> The Chora is neither male nor female, but third genders. It is the twisting, turning, folding of cyberspace. It is multimedia. And it has a totally new reconception of memory. The Chora is the impossible. CATTt can only be a stand-in for this impossibility. Ulmer writes: “My problem, in inventing an electronic rhetoric by replacing <span class="lightEmphasis">topos</span> with <span class="lightEmphasis">chora</span> in the practice of invention, is to devise a ‘discourse on method’ for that which, similarly, is the other of method” (66).</p>
<p>The key in great part is the new concept of memory. Ulmer explains that Chorography as a practice corresponds to recent developments in computing such as “connectionism.” Opposed to the classical concept of memory as storing information in some specific locale from which it may be retrieved, “connectionist designs of computer memory” are not stored at any specific locus, but <span class="lightEmphasis">in</span> the myriad relationships <span class="lightEmphasis">among</span> various loci (36). (It’s worth repeating: Not <span class="lightEmphasis">in</span> but <span class="lightEmphasis">among</span>). Entitlement has gone to the computer, if it can still be called entitlement. And it entitles while it perpetually disentitles. The bits and bytes, though numbered, are not as we keep touting in commonsensical ways predetermined according to algorithmic connections. At least, not in hypertext and hypermedia; from a ‘traditional’ perspective, many scattered possible readings or con-fusions are possible in multimedia environments. Hence, <span class="lightEmphasis">Yes</span> is the answer to every possible question concerning every possible connection. The ‘traditional’ grammars and laws concerning coordination and subordination no longer hold in multimedia. Multimedia are entries into possible worlds. Yes, we have arrived to find ourselves ‘as if among’ the strange lists in Borges’s Chinese Encyclopedia (see Foucault xv).</p>
<p>Space has changed. “In short,” Ulmer says, “the change in thinking from linear indexical to network association - a shift often used to summarize the difference between alphabetic and electronic cognitive styles…is happening at the level of the technology itself” (36). As hardware and software change, so institutions and disciplines similarly change. And so does the thinking and writing that gets generated in and by them. If this sounds farfetched, let us not forget that the medium is the message. And if we are not aware, let’s understand that there are students in classes today who not only have watched a lot of television (which Ulmer sees as not a problem, but a cure) but also have never written or typed anything on paper but only on a monitor. (Ulmer does not write elegies for Gutenberg). And more potentially interesting, there are graduate students today who have seldom, if ever, stood in front of human beings in a classroom when they teach, but communicate for the most part to and with their students by way of on-line discussion lists or MOOs. In fact, many of these student teachers do not see themselves as “teachers” but as “facilitators.” The medium teaches.</p>
<p>And yet, how is one to write by way of the Chora, when apparently there is no way? Ulmer muses:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">An important aspect of chorography is learning how to <span class="lightEmphasis">write</span> an intuition, and this writing is what distinguishes electronic logic (conduction) from the abductive (Baker Street) reasoning of the detective. In conjunction the intuitions are not left in the thinker’s body but simulated in a machine, augmented by a prosthesis (whether electronic or paper). This (indispensable) augmentation of ideological categories in a machine is known in chorography as “artificial stupidity,” which is the term used to indicate that a database includes a computerized unconscious. (37-38)</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Item:</span> I would point us now (for the sake of identification and then contrast on the way to excess) to Charles Sanders Peirce’s notion of thinking, namely, to his cryptic phrase “esperable uberty.” What can this wording possibly mean? Thomas A. Sebeok suggests that <span class="lightEmphasis">esperable</span> “must mean ‘expected’ or ‘hoped for’ ” (1). And <span class="lightEmphasis">uberty</span>, “rich growth, fruitfulness, fertility, copiousness, abundance” (1). Sebeok continues:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">[Peirce] explained that it should be one of the two principal aims of logicians to educe the possible and esperable uberty, or “value in productiveness,” of the three canonical types of reasoning, to wit: deduction, induction, and abduction (the latter term alternatively baptized retroduction or hypothetic inference). It is the uberty, that is, the fruitfulness, of this last type of reasoning that, he tells us, increases, while its security, or approach to certainty, minifies. (1)</p>
<p>The classical doctrines of certainty (formal logic) and probability (informal logic) progressively give way to possibility or, better put, chance in the sense of hazard or accident. “A throw of the dice does not abolish hazard.” As we move conceptually and experientially toward the third (abduction, chance), so we move toward greater risk but with greater payoffs. Paralleling the three doctrines of certainty, probability, and accident, and the three Peircean logics, are three aids to reflection: algorithms (which find the one correct answer), heuristics (which invite several reasonable answers), and aleatory procedures (which disengage by way of a throw of the dice or randomness).</p>
<p>Allow me to hazard a dis/connection here, as I already have throughout this review. Note how each of these groupings are in threes, or form a triplicity, or lead to a trilemma. As Peirce moves toward threes he hazards the possibility of risking everything to gain everything. He hazards the loss of rationality. He and others move, I would think, toward reintroducing the excluded third or middle term. (The principles of logic are identification, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle). With the return of the third comes the possibility of the return of the repressed/suppressed, unnamely, all that which has not been considered canonized thinking. All that which has been excluded for the sake of meaning! Esperable Uberty! But Peirce does not venture that far from meaning with his speculative rhetoric.</p>
<p>Ulmer makes clear (215-19) that the present-day technology that establishes the conditions for chorography and the paralogic of conduction risks an even greater return or loss than Peirce’s abduction could ever hope for. Esperable uberty has been and is continuing to be exponentially refolded to third (rhizomatic) relationships. As Ulmer points: “Here is a principle of chorography: do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings (write the paradigm)” (48). And while doing so, write, unbeknownst to yourself and others, new paradigms that might generate still other paradigms, saying Yes to everything…</p>
<p class="epigraph">The dream that I pursue is to see the dying tree of philosophy bloom once again, in a blossoming without disillusionment, abundant with bizarre thought-flowers, red, blue, and white, shimmering in the colors of the beginning, as in the Greek dawn, when <span class="lightEmphasis">theoria</span> was beginning and when, inconceivably and suddenly, like everything clear, understanding found its language. Are we really culturally too old to repeat such experiences?<br />
Peter Sloterdijk</p>
<p><span class="emphasis">Item:</span> What follows from this discussion of the first 50 pages of <span class="booktitle">Heuretics</span> are 200 pages of some of the most brilliant performances that begin with Ulmer’s mother sending him “some clippings from my hometown newspaper about preparations for the centennial celebration of Montana’s statehood” (49). In themselves, these pages function as paradigm after paradigm of writing the accident, from which colleagues and students might work, that is, play. Glue (Ulmer) begins practicing connectionisms among Parc de la Villette, the Columbian Exposition, Disneyland (Epcot Center), Ziegfield Follies, an excursion on the etymology of “folly,” Miles City, saloon/salon (this is more of the Paris-Miles City axis), to Poe’s “The Black Cat,” to CATTt, and into the next chapter, which begins with Atlantis and thereafter rhizomatically folds and refolds. He connects the dots together but in unexpected ways. As I say, it’s brilliant and you have to experience it yourself. In my estimation, Glue gives - the Chora gives - us (without entitlement) a dreamwork that suggests “the dying tree of philosophy [might just] bloom once again…with bizarre thought-flowers, red, blue, and white.” (Ulmer’s homepage [or <span class="lightEmphasis">theoria</span> /spectacle] is decorated in <a class="outbound" href="http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~gulmer/">red, blue, and white</a>. You should browse that impossible, yet possible way and see what else…he will have been practicing).</p>
<p>[Joseph Tabbi interviews Gregory Ulmer in <a class="internal" href="/criticalecologies/reinventive">A Project for a New Consultancy</a>, eds.]</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>Derrida, Jacques. “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve.” In <span class="booktitle">Writing and Difference</span>. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978: 251-77.</p>
<p>Foucault, Michel. <span class="booktitle">The Order of Things</span>. New York: Vintage, 1973.</p>
<p>Joyce, James. <span class="booktitle">Finnegans Wake</span>. New York: Penguin, 1976.</p>
<p>Lyotard, Jean François. <span class="booktitle">The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge</span>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.</p>
<p>Lyotard, Jean François, and Jean-Loup Thebaud. <span class="booktitle">Just Gaming</span>. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.</p>
<p>Sebeok, Thomas A. “One, Two, Three Spells U B E R T Y,” in <span class="booktitle">The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce</span>. Ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988: 1-10.</p>
<p>Ulmer, Gregory L. <span class="booktitle">Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys</span>. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.</p>
<p>Vitanza, Victor J. “Threes.” In <span class="booktitle">Composition in Context</span>. Ed. W. Ross Winterowd and Vincent Gillespie. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994: 196-218.</p>
<p>White, Eric Charles. <span class="booktitle">Kaironomia: On the Will-to-Invent</span>. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/victor-vitanza">Victor Vitanza</a>, <a href="/tags/greg-ulmer">greg ulmer</a>, <a href="/tags/derrida">derrida</a>, <a href="/tags/deconstruction">deconstruction</a>, <a href="/tags/grammatology">grammatology</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/hayden-white">hayden white</a>, <a href="/tags/mystory">mystory</a>, <a href="/tags/frederich-schlegel">Frederich Schlegel</a>, <a href="/tags/electracy">electracy</a>, <a href="/tags/james-joyce">james joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/freud">freud</a>, <a href="/tags/lyotard">lyotard</a>, <a href="/tags/paul-feyerabend">Paul Feyerabend</a>, <a href="/tags/eric-white">eric white</a>, <a href="/tags/marcel-duchamp">Marcel Duchamp</a>, <a href="/tags/michael-polanyi">Michael Polanyi</a>, <a href="/tags/cattt">CATTt</a>, <a href="/tags/logos">logos</a>, <a href="/tags/topos">topos</a>, <a href="/tags/chronos">chronos</a>, <a href="/tags/ar">Ar</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator913 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comCybertext Killed the Hypertext Starhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/cyberdebates
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Nick Montfort</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2000-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><h2>the hypertext murder case</h2>
<p>
“Hypertext is dead - ” declared Markku Eskelinen at Digital Arts<br />
and Culture ‘99 in Atlanta. “Cybertext killed it.”<br /><ebr-gloss position="1"></ebr-gloss><br />
No doubt, interesting hypertext poetry and fiction remains to be<br />
written, but - if we consider hypertext as a category that defines a<br />
special, valid space for authorship and criticism of computerized works<br />
of writing - Eskelinen is clearly right. The hypertext corpus has been<br />
produced; if it is to be resurrected, it will only be as part of a<br />
patchwork that includes other types of literary machines.
</p>
<p>
One viable category today, perhaps the most interesting one to<br />
consider, is that of “cybertext.” The word was first used in the<br />
critical discourse by Espen Aarseth in<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic<br />
Literature.</span><br />
The term denotes not all possible networks of lexia, but the<br />
more general set of text machines. These machines are operated by<br />
readers, and depending upon how they are operated they present different<br />
outputs, different texts for reading. The cybertext category therefore<br />
contains hypertext, which is operated by means of clicking and<br />
traversing links, but it is much broader. Indeed, Aarseth’s chief<br />
accomplishment in<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span><br />
was not to completely illuminate any particular interactive work<br />
or form of computational writing, but to erase the stifling hypertext<br />
boundary, and to redraw that boundary so that it demarcates a more<br />
interesting territory of reader-influenced texts. The cybertext terrain<br />
includes computational literary artifacts that are in some cases novel,<br />
although yet to be thoroughly explored. In other cases, the cybertexts<br />
included have some history, but one that is woefully neglected.
</p>
<p>
Notably absent from Aarseth’s definition of cybertext is mention<br />
of the link, and this missing link - or, more specifically, this<br />
replacement of the link with a more interesting feature of computational<br />
literary interaction - frees the new category from the chains of a<br />
critical-theory-influenced and essentially non-computational<br />
perspective. The definition of computer hypertext given in George<br />
Landow’s 1992<br /><span class="booktitle">Hypertext</span><br />
(a work that, like<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>, took the category of literature under consideration as its<br />
eponym) was drawn from Roland Barthes’s<br /><span class="booktitle">S/Z</span>. Landow describes the form as “text composed of blocks of words<br />
(or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails<br />
in an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the<br />
terms link, node, network, web, and path.” Landow also indicates here,<br />
by his use of the term “computer hypertext,” that non-computer hypertext<br />
- besides the hypertexts he describes as implicit, such as<br /><span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span><br />
- exists as well; Cort·zar’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Hopscotch</span><br />
and Queneau’s “Story as You Like It” are in this category.<br />
Oddly, the idea that hypertexts can appear in print has been a<br />
contentious point for some critics, many of whom either see the<br />
electronic digital computer as an essential element in defining a<br />
category of interactive texts or consider all texts (which one can,<br />
after all, skip around in) as hypertexts. Aarseth deftly disposes of<br />
this issue by simply making his definition independent of the medium in<br />
which the work is presented.
</p>
<p>As appropriate as the hypertext category might be for Landow’s<br />
topic (the embodiment of late 20th century critical theory in<br />
interactive computer text forms), it includes only a subset of<br />
electronic literary efforts. An extended analogy to the theory of<br />
computation demonstrates this restricted scope, and explains why the old<br />
collection called hypertext cannot continue to hold our interest as a<br />
critical category or as a category describing what literary efforts<br />
should be considered valid and worthy.</p>
<h2>classes of computational power</h2>
<p>There are four different classes of theoretical computers.<br />
Since theoretical computers can compute the same sorts of algorithms as<br />
can languages governed by formally-defined grammars, these four<br />
computational classes map directly to four classes of formal language.<br />
Only the first and fourth class will be considered at all here, but in<br />
terms of increasing generality (i.e., ability to execute larger and<br />
larger sets of algorithms to solve additional classes of problems) the<br />
four classes are as follows, ranked in what is known as the Chomsky<br />
hierarchy:</p>
<p> 1. Finite automata / Regular languages<br /><br />
2. Pushdown automata / Context-free languages<br /><br />
3. Linear bounded automata / Context-sensitive languages<br /><br />
4. Turing machines / Recursively enumerable languages<br /></p>
<p>A computer in the first class, when given a string of inputs,<br />
will indicate after each whether it accepts the input or not. Using the<br />
alphabet of possible inputs (the alphabet “ab” is one, but any alphabet,<br />
including ours, can be used) a finite automaton accomplishes useful<br />
computational tasks by accepting certain strings and rejecting others.<br />
Given that there are a finite number of words in the English language,<br />
including their inflected forms, a finite automaton using the “a-z”<br />
alphabet can be constructed to distinguish English words from other<br />
strings of letters. A large amount of enumeration would be involved, but<br />
the task could clearly be accomplished. Another automaton using the<br />
alphabet “ab” could be constructed to distinguish all strings [ab]*<br />
(which includes “abab” and “ababababab”), or b*[aaa]b* (which includes<br />
“aaabbbbbbb” and “bbaaab”), or - as the Chomsky hierarchy above<br />
indicates - any given “regular expression” of the sort Unix grep is used<br />
to find. In fact, it is correct to conceptualize the use of the Unix<br />
grep utility, or the Find dialog in Microsoft Word or one’s text editor<br />
of choice, as a way of programming a finite automaton. The programming<br />
is done so that strings in a regular language can be recognized; so the<br />
expression can be found in the text that is used as input for this<br />
simple computer. Of course, while the Find dialog is useful, it does not<br />
constitute a very powerful computer, and certainly not a general-purpose<br />
one. A finite automaton of this weakest class cannot even distinguish<br />
strings such as “aaaabbbb” and “aaaaaabbbbbb” (N occurrences of “a”<br />
followed by N occurrences of “b”) from those that do not fit this<br />
pattern. For this, a computer of at least the second class is<br />
needed.</p>
<p>
Before leaving the finite automaton, however, it is important to<br />
note that this simplest theoretical computer can be described in a<br />
diagram that has nodes linked by transition rules. The diagram shown<br />
here describes a finite automaton that accepts strings of the form<br />
[b]*a[b]*a - any number of “b’s” (including 0) followed by “a” followed<br />
by any number of “b’s”(including 0) followed by “a.”</p>
<p> <span style="width:100%;text-align:center;"><br /><img src="../../sites/default/files/essays/finite.gif" width="249" height="194" /><br /></span><br /></p>
<p>Note that the possible paths through a static Web site with<br />
five pages, each offering at most two sorts of link, can be<br />
conceptualized with a very similar diagram - with the same diagram, in<br />
fact, appropriately labeled. Hypertexts of the sort that typify the<br />
category - whether crafted in HTML or various proprietary environments<br />
such as the Microsoft Help Workshop or Eastgate’s Storyspace - present<br />
lexia (pages) as nodes, and links as transition rules. Such hypertexts<br />
are text machines of the first class, finite automata. Adding random<br />
effects, revealing or concealing links based on the history of<br />
interaction, or allowing the reader to jump to a node by name, will of<br />
course move the hypertext beyond this simplest level of computational<br />
complexity. But the essential definition of the form, a set of lexia<br />
connected by links, most clearly relates to the lowest and simplest<br />
level of the Chomsky hierarchy.</p>
<p>The computers sitting on our desks, stashed in our backpacks,<br />
and integrated into our cars and microwaves are (except for the<br />
non-theoretical fact that they have limited memory) Turing machines,<br />
devices of the fourth computational class. These general-purpose<br />
computing machines take input, provide output, and can solve any<br />
computer-solvable problem. Given inputs from the keyboard in the form of<br />
a string and allowing outputs to the monitor in the form of a string, a<br />
Turing machine can run Quake III, display GRAMMATRON, or beat Garry<br />
Kasparov in chess. Indeed, the computers that do these things are Turing<br />
machines. Computers may be slower or faster, and they are all ultimately<br />
constrained by disk space and RAM, but there is no known theoretical<br />
computer more powerful than a Turing machine. Because of its ability to<br />
compute any algorithmm that is computable at all, the Turing machine is<br />
also called a universal computer.</p>
<p>
The cybertext, according to Aarseth, is a machine for the<br />
production of expression. It may model a world underneath the textual<br />
surface (as is done in MUDs and text adventures), it may select<br />
conversational responses based on the reader’s textual input (as<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br />
and<br /><span class="booktitle">Racter</span><br />
do), or it may (as in hypertext) offer additional lexia based on<br />
the links that the reader follows. The defining characteristic of these<br />
text machines - what distinguishes them from<br /><span class="booktitle">Ulysses</span>, for instance, however allusive and open to sampling that text<br />
might be - is that they calculate. They do not,<br /><span class="lightEmphasis">essentially</span>, have links. They essentially have computational ability.
</p>
<p>The paradigm of the hypertext is the least powerful<br />
computational machine, the finite automaton. The prototypical cybertext<br />
is of the fourth and most powerful computational class - a Turing<br />
machine.</p>
<h2>hot, ergodic cybertext</h2>
<p>
“Ergodics” and “cybertext” provoke curiosity. Aarseth attracts<br />
the reading eye by using one neologism each for title and subtitle. He<br />
has also selected terms that sound somewhat similar to the words<br />
“erotics” and “cybersex.” Cybertext is certainly a recent term, and new<br />
to literary studies, but Aarseth was not the first to use it. A book by<br />
science-fiction poet Bruce Boston, published in 1992, is titled<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>. The term “ergodic” is used to denote a work that requires<br />
labor from the reader to create a path. This is not in reference to a<br />
traditional book that is difficult to read, of course. Aarseth is<br />
careful not to get wrapped up in metaphorically applying the idea of<br />
multiple paths, confusing reader response for influence over the<br />
actually presented appearance of the text, or employing Barthian uses of<br />
the term “writerly” to refer to someone who is not literally doing<br />
writing. Calvino’s<br /><span class="booktitle">If on a Winter’s Night a<br />
Traveller</span><br />
is not an ergodic work by his definition, since, whatever<br />
tortuous paths may be represented within it, there is only one course<br />
through it that is actually presented for the reader to take. Cort·zar’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Hopscotch</span><br />
is ergodic, by contrast, since the reader does choose a path -<br />
even though only one choice is explicitly presented, so there are<br />
actually only two explicit paths through the novel. “Ergodic” is<br />
borrowed by Aarseth from the field of ergodic theory, where it means<br />
something else entirely. The present use of the term is justified by the<br />
etymological roots of the word, which are in the Greek words for “work”<br />
and “path.”
</p>
<p>The text that constitutes a cybertext is not “a chain of<br />
signifiers” in the linguistic sense, Aarseth explains, but “a whole<br />
range of phenomena, from short poems to complex computer programs and<br />
databases.” Text includes natural human language, but also data<br />
structures, functions, procedures, and programmatic objects. The<br />
cybertext is considered as a machine, “not metaphorically but as a<br />
mechanical device for the production and consumption of verbal signs.”<br />
The text/machine operates on verbal signs, requires a medium (just as a<br />
filmstrip requires a projector), and depends upon the action of a human<br />
operator. These three elements are shown at the vertices of the<br />
text/machine triangle. This division clarifies several confusions -<br />
pointing out that we should attend to the medium as an important but<br />
distinct aspect of cybertextual experience, and suggesting that<br />
“operation” should be considered as fundamentally different than<br />
“reading,” which of course it is.</p>
<h2>text adventures and interactive fiction</h2>
<p>
In<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span><br />
there is examination of the aesthetics of hypertext, the<br />
experience of MUDs (environments that have received a good deal of<br />
attention from the perspective of cultural studies and computer mediated<br />
communication), the semiotics of an arcade-style computer game (a form<br />
seldom discussed even by game designers, which so far lacks even a<br />
critical vocabulary), and the nature of the “cyborg author”<br /><a class="internal" href="/firstperson/creole">Katherine Hayles<br />
reviews Diane Greco’s ‘Cyborg’</a><br />
and<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br />
-descendent<br /><span class="booktitle">Racter</span><br />
(representative of an underexplored form, but one that has<br />
benefited from the examination and development done by Janet Murray).<br />
These discussions are useful, although not strikingly insightful. The<br />
chapter on MUDs, for instance, does not convincingly describe these<br />
environments as mainly literary, mainly ludic, or even mainly dramatic,<br />
rather than being essentially social. The discussion of<br /><span class="booktitle">Dark Castle</span><br />
and<br /><span class="booktitle">Lemmings</span><br />
effectively topples Peter B¯gh Anderson’s semiotic typology of<br />
the computer video game, but leaves open the question of what typology<br />
might work, or whether the perspective of distiguishing classes of signs<br />
is a fruitful one at all. (Aarseth’s discussion of the typology of<br />
texts, in which he distinguishes seven variables that apply to<br />
cybertexts, is one positive contribution along these lines.) In<br />
venturing into new territory, Aarseth points out areas of interest where<br />
future work can profitably be done.
</p>
<p>
The chapter exploring Marc Blank’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span>, a work of interactive fiction from 1982, is particularly<br />
interesting - interesting to me, no doubt, because I work in this<br />
particular form. Aside from that, the chapter is unusual in considering<br />
interactive fiction in the context of literature. Such discussion has<br />
been almost entirely neglected by academics since Mary Ann Buckles’s<br />
1985 PhD thesis on<br /><span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>. Also interesting is that in this chapter, a cybertext with<br />
evident narrative elements is explored, - not the case during the<br />
discussion of MUDs and arcade games. These factors make it fruitful to<br />
look at the “Intrigue and Discourse in the Adventure Game” chapter in<br />
detail. The chapter also illustrates some of the practical difficulties<br />
involved in broadening the category of acceptable electronic literature<br />
to include other works, and reveals some of the benefits and insights<br />
which can come from such broadening - insights which would have been<br />
much harder to come by if critical discussion were restricted to<br />
hypertext.
</p>
<p>
The publisher of<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br />
was the software development company Infocom (now a label of<br />
Activision), which also published<br /><span class="booktitle">Zork I-III</span><br />
and two works that attraced some notice for their literary<br />
merits, Brian Moriarity’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Trinity</span><br />
and Steven Meretzky’s<br /><span class="booktitle">A Mind Forever Voyaging</span>, The<br /><span class="booktitle">Zork</span><br />
series, based on a mainframe implementation of<br /><span class="booktitle">Zork</span><br />
at MIT, became the most widely-known commercial text adventure<br />
trilogy. It was strongly influenced by the earlier mainframe work<br /><span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>.
</p>
<p>Interactive fiction of the text adventure sort accepts textual,<br />
natural-language input from the individual formerly known as the reader.<br />
(Aarseth more aptly labels this individual the “operator.” I and others<br />
have used the term “interactor” in the past. Both terms suffice to show<br />
that manipulation of the cybertext is done by this individual, not just<br />
reading.) In response to this input, usually a command to the main<br />
character in the story, actions and events transpire in a simulated<br />
world and text is produced to indicate what has happened. Then, unless<br />
the character has progressed to some conclusion of the story, the<br />
operator is allowed to provide more input and the cycle continues.</p>
<p>
The phrase “interactive fiction” is used almost exclusively<br />
today among aficionados of this form (often it is abbreviated “IF”), but<br />
this term can cause loud gnashing of teeth among hypertext authors. They<br />
ask, “if these things are interactive fiction, what is my work - not<br />
interactive?” (This complaint usually comes from the people who brought<br />
you “serious hypertext,” a phrase that clearly suggests everything else<br />
is not serious.) This would be a reasonable question in many cases, but<br />
literary terms often employ adjectives that are not exclusively<br />
descriptive of a single form. One could ask a similar question about<br />
many other literary categories, after all: “If this is concrete poetry,<br />
what is my poetry, abstract?” “If this is language poetry, what is my<br />
poetry, not language?” “If this is a novel, what is my work, a passÈ?”<br />
The term “interactive fiction” is not a claim that the form it describes<br />
is the<br /><span class="lightEmphasis">only</span><br />
fiction that is interactive in any way. It was simply coined<br />
because interactivity and fiction are central features of this form,<br />
which also has other distinguishing characteristics that do not lend<br />
themselves to encapsulation in two words.
</p>
<p>The other main argument against use of the term is brought up<br />
by Aarseth, who correctly points out that the word “interactive” is a<br />
commercial catchword that has been used to promise vague technological<br />
enhancements and improvements. (Ironically, of course, Aarseth names his<br />
own category of literature “cybertext” - as if the “cyber” prefix were<br />
somehow less tainted by hype than is the word “interactive.”)<br />
“Interactive” is certainly no longer constantly denuded of meaning in<br />
the marketplace today, whatever false promises it may have once held<br />
out. Historically, that word, by itself, has been used to distinguish<br />
computer processes which reply to user input (just as interactive<br />
fiction does) from batch processes, which run without any user<br />
intervention. Used in that sense, of course, the term “interactive” is<br />
very broad, and would apply to hypertext fiction as well as many other<br />
programs. But the entire term “interactive fiction” has its own history.<br />
It was used by Adventure International, and later Infocom, to designate<br />
their works, referring to something of exactly the sort described above.<br />
The term has also been used in the academic discourse, specifically to<br />
refer to works similar to since the early 1980s.</p>
<p>
There is another reason to prefer the term “interactive fiction”<br />
over “text adventure.” Not all interactive fiction, and not even all<br />
classic works in the form, are actually text adventures, simply because<br />
not all of them are “adventures” - extraordinary explorations involving<br />
danger. In fact,<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br />
is not a text adventure.<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br />
is a detective mystery, in contrast to the fantasy adventures in<br />
the<br /><span class="booktitle">Zork</span><br />
series and the Infocom adventures that transpire in modern-day<br />
settings, such as<br /><span class="booktitle">Cutthroats</span><br />
by Michael Berlyn and Jerry Wolper and<br /><span class="booktitle">Infidel</span><br />
by Berlyn. Although interviewing murder suspects may be unusual<br />
for the interactor and may involve some danger to the protagonist, the<br />
situation is a very ordinary one for this main character, a detective.<br />
Most other famous interactive fiction works (including the very literary<br /><span class="booktitle">Mindwheel</span><br />
by Robert Pinsky) are true text adventures, so it is not the<br />
case that all text adventures are pulp and all other interactive fiction<br />
works are artifacts of high culture. It is the case, however, that the<br />
category “interactive fiction” is not synonymous with “text adventure,”<br />
and the former term is the appropriate one to define the whole category.
</p>
<p>
Similar arguments can be made against other proposed terms,<br />
namely “text adventure game” and “text game.” Some works of interactive<br />
fiction, in addition to not being adventures, are not games - certainly,<br />
they are no more games than are the least game-like hypertext fictions.<br />
And there are all-text games, like<br /><span class="booktitle">Rogue</span><br />
and<br /><span class="booktitle">NetHack</span>, which are not interactive fictions. The term “interactive<br />
fiction,” most widely used by those who actually create and experience<br />
these works, is the best descriptor for this category, and deserves to<br />
be re-established as interest in this form is reawakened.
</p>
<p>Discussion of terminology may appear to be useless quibbling,<br />
but it is very important if new types of ergodic literature are to be<br />
considered by hypertext authors and critics. It is very difficult for<br />
individuals to take some alien subcategory of the cybertext set<br />
seriously if they disagree vehemently about what that category should be<br />
called. If they happen to strongly prefer a name that sounds<br />
low-cultural and non-literary, it is all the more important to advance<br />
solid arguments for the commonly used and most precise term.</p>
<h2>meeting deadline</h2>
<p>
Aarseth examines “adventure game” interaction as exemplified by<br />
the murder mystery<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span>. In this interactive fiction cybertext, both story and game,<br />
Mr. Robner has been found dead in his locked study and the operator must<br />
direct the detective to investigate, walking around the house in which<br />
the death occurred, examining things, and interviewing suspects. Aarseth<br />
comes to the conclusion that the operator, who is ignorant of the proper<br />
outcome and of what he or she is supposed to do, is actually not at all<br />
a “wreader” with strong authorial power, a similar conclusion to that<br />
which Buckles reached regarding<br /><span class="booktitle">Adventure</span>. Instead, the operator is what Aarseth calls an “intriguee,”<br />
the target of an elaborate intrigue perpetrated by the designer of the<br />
narrative world. This is a kinder interpretation than, but similar to,<br />
one I made in<br /><a class="outbound"></a>
href="http://www.suck.com/daily/97/01/27/"&gt;Interactor’s Nightmare, an article on Suck.com that was published during the same<br />
month<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span><br />
came out. There, I suggested that the operator of an interactive<br />
fiction usually is in the same situation as the protagonist of<br />
Christopher Durang’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Actor’s Nightmare</span><br />
- thrust upon the stage without any warning, without having had<br />
time to learn lines or even know what play is being enacted. Aarseth’s<br />
concept of intrigue, discovered in his encounter with a work of<br />
interactive fiction, applies to other cybertextual experiences as well.<br />
It could be used to enlighten critical discussion of works such as John<br />
McDaid’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Uncle Buddy’s Funhouse</span><br />
and Rob Swigart’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Portal</span>, which present puzzling worlds that the operator must decipher.
</p>
<p>
Aarseth only touches on the ludic nature of<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span>, though he at least makes mention of the game-like qualities of<br />
this and other cybertexts. In a comment on one specific<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br />
interaction, Aarseth complains that some of the replies provided<br />
are “pure nonsense,” giving the example of the work’s response to the<br />
command “fingerprint me”: “Upon looking over and dusting the me you<br />
notice there are no good fingerprints to be found.” Actually the<br />
response, although unhelpful in the context of trying to win the game,<br />
is sensible, amusing, and perfectly apropos. Aarseth no doubt wanted his<br />
detective protagonist to perform an odd behavior: to stop, ink his<br />
hands, and record his own fingerprints on paper in the middle of an<br />
investigation. For the interactive fiction to parse his command<br />
differently and come up with an even more odd interpretation is not<br />
nonsense, but felicity.
</p>
<p>
In a 1984<br /><span class="booktitle">Computer Games</span><br />
article, Dan Gutman urges operators to have fun by prodding the<br />
parser in similarly unusual ways: “after you’ve given up for the night<br />
trying to find out who the murderer is in<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br />
or<br /><span class="booktitle">The Witness</span>, have some fun with the computer. Tell it a joke. Insult it.<br />
Type in a sentence which makes no sense.” This sort of subversive<br />
interaction is not particularly uncommon in any sort of gaming or play<br />
situation, as children often use toys and software for purposes that are<br />
different from or even contrary to those intended by the creators of<br />
these products.
</p>
<p>
<applet alt="Your browser does not support Java, or Java is not&lt;br /&gt;&#10; enabled." codebase="cyberdebates" archive="" code="ZPlet/Zplet.class"></applet>
width="409" height="409"&gt;</p>
<param name="Foreground" value="green" /><param name="Background" value="black" /><param name="StatusForeground" value="black" /><param name="StatusBackground" value="green" /><param name="StoryFile" value="ExDead.z5" /><p> <span class="emphasis">[Click above, type something, and press<br />
Enter to interact with this Deadline excerpt.]</span></p>
<p>
In interactive fiction, this subversive typing is an interesting<br />
way to interact, and has been recognized as such since early in the life<br />
of the form.<br /><span class="booktitle">Zork</span><br />
creators David Lebling, Marc Blank, and Tim Anderson mention<br />
this mode as one of two interesting ones (the other being the<br />
problem-solving mode of interaction) in their 1979 article in<br /><span class="booktitle">IEEE Computer</span>: “a great deal of the enjoyment of such games is derived by<br />
probing their responses in a sort of informal Turing test: ‘I wonder<br />
what it will say if I do this?’ The players (and designers) delight in<br />
clever (or unexpected) responses to otherwise useless actions.” The<br />
operator using the text/machine in this way is engaged, and enjoys the<br />
text responses that are provided, but seems to be ignoring the<br />
overriding interactive and narrative purposes for which the interactive<br />
fiction was purportedly created. This mode, perhaps, offers the true<br />
“play” that these “games” provide. Solving puzzles in order to advance<br />
in the story is actually more work than play, related to mathematical<br />
and logical challenge more than ludic enjoyment. The operator who solves<br />
puzzles must labor to understand the author’s intentions and slog<br />
forward, learning the correct operation of the text machine and then<br />
operating it. The one who pokes at the interface to see what will happen<br />
is actually being playful.
</p>
<p>In this chapter, as elsewhere, when Aarseth is not making<br />
strong original contributions, he is still practicing a basic standard<br />
of scholarship often not met by other writers. He corrects publication<br />
years given by previous authors; provides the names of actual<br />
interactive fiction authors, so often omitted in lieu of simply naming<br />
the publisher or pretending that the work sprang forth of its own<br />
accord; and insists that critics attend to other details with the same<br />
care they use in researching the citation of a printed text. That<br />
Aarseth attends so closely to the works he discusses is not a<br />
spectacular feature of the book, but such attention is necessary if<br />
previously neglected cybertexts are to be discussed alongside other<br />
works and treated with critical respect.</p>
<h2>ghosts and the text/machine</h2>
<p>
The epigraph for<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span><br />
is from Italo Calvino’s provocative essay, “Cybernetics and<br />
Ghosts.” It reminds the reader that</p>
<p class="longQuotation">The literature machine[’s] poetic<br />
result will be the particular effect of one of these permutations on a<br />
man endowed with a consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an<br />
empirical and historical man. It will be the shock that occurs only if<br />
the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual<br />
and his society.</p>
<p> These ghosts are not a major topic of discussion in<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>. They flit outside of Aarseth’s text/machine triangle, without<br />
connecting to it directly as its verticies (operator, verbal sign, and<br />
medium) do. A moment of shock occurs during the encounter with any<br />
provocative text, whether generated cybertextually or not, and this<br />
moment is often profound and enigmatic. In the case of a cybertext, the<br />
shock can come not only from reading (the encounter with a particular<br />
permutation of verbal signs) but from reading in the specific context of<br />
text/machine operation.
</p>
<p>
It is this particular moment that may first have been<br />
experienced by Joseph Weizenbaum’s secretary, or perhaps one of the<br />
other early operators of<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span>, a computer character Weizenbaum developed to simulate a<br />
psychotherapist. Operators of<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br />
type replies to questions in plain English. The text/machine<br />
then issues a noncommittal response, sometimes excerpting from what the<br />
operator has typed. Although Weizenbaum had been working on the program<br />
for several months in the presence of his secretary (as he relates in<br />
his 1976 book<br /><span class="booktitle">Computer Power and Reason</span>), one day as she operated the text/machine, via a teletype, she<br />
asked him to leave the room so that she could converse in private.
</p>
<p>
A legend related by Janet Murray in talks after the release of<br />
her book<br /><span class="booktitle">Hamlet on the Holodeck</span><br />
offers a more powerful twist on this story. Entering his office<br />
one day, as the legend has it, Weizenbaum saw his secretary bowed before<br />
the teletype, broken down in tears. A transcript of interaction with<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br />
was on the printout. “I’ve just had a breakthrough with my<br />
analyst,” the secretary explained.
</p>
<p>
Clearly, reading through a transcript of the same text, or<br />
clicking along links to read the doctor-patient dialog in a hypertext<br />
would not have had the same effect on this cybertextual operator. The<br />
operation of a cybertext such as<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br />
is not only interesting because it results in a particular,<br />
provocative series of signifiers, but because it creates a context of<br />
operation - which might involve exploration, writing, and witnessing the<br />
reaction to what the operator has written, and engaging in other forms<br />
of advanced computational exchange.
</p>
<p>
<applet alt="Your browser does not support Java, or Java is not&lt;br /&gt;&#10; enabled." codebase="cyberdebates" archive="" code="Eliza/Eliza.class"></applet>
width="400" height="200"&gt;</p>
<param name="script" />
value="http://www.altxlists.com/ebressays/electropoetics/cyberdebates/script" /&gt;<br /><p> <span class="emphasis">[Click in the box, type something, and<br />
press Enter to interact with Eliza.]</span></p>
<p>
Whatever the early cybertextual encounter of computer<br />
psychotherapist and secretary was like - tearful or not - in it, this<br />
shock of connection with individual and social ghosts was certainly<br />
achieved. And this shock occurred about 35 years ago, as<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br />
was developed between 1964 and 1966. After this incident (and in<br />
part as a result of it, if legend is to be believed), Weizenbaum, a<br />
pioneer in artificial intelligence, denounced the field. He stopped his<br />
research and drowned his book.
</p>
<p>
Cybertexts long ago demonstrated their potential to be<br />
provocative, affecting, and powerful. Thanks to Aarseth’s book, a larger<br />
literary category has been declared worthy of critical attention - a<br />
category which includes<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span>, MUDs, poetry that involves text morphing and motion in<br />
response to input, interactive fiction, and other sorts of<br />
non-hypertextual works. Additionally, thanks to<br /><span class="booktitle">Cybertext</span>, authors who create works in these forms are more likely to<br />
find their efforts acknowledged as valid from a literary standpoint.<br />
Critics may still prefer to examine hypertexts, if their tastes in<br />
text/machine operation lead them to dwell on that set of cybertexts, but<br />
they will find it increasingly difficult to consider other cybertexts -<br />
with their more powerful computational abilities and their demonstrated<br />
ability to affect the consciousness and unconsciousness of the operator<br />
- as categorically less serious and worthwhile.
</p>
<p></p><h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>
Buckles, Mary Ann.<br /><span class="booktitle">Interactive Fiction: The Computer<br />
Storygame ‘Adventure’</span>. PhD Dissertation, University of California San Diego, 1985.
</p>
<p>
Gutman, Dan. “Shoot Your Own Men! And Other Weird Ways to Play.”<br /><span class="booktitle">Computer Games</span>. Dac/Jan 1984.
</p>
<p>
Landow, George.<br /><span class="booktitle">Hypertext: The Convergence of<br />
Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology</span>. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
</p>
<p>
Lebling, David P., Marc S. Blank, and Timothy A. Anderson.<br />
“Zork: A Computerized Fantasy Simulation Game.”<br /><span class="booktitle">IEEE Computer.</span>, 12:4, 1979: 51-59.
</p>
<p></p><h2>programs included</h2>
<p>
Blank, Mark.<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span>. (Excerpt allowing play for the first hour of game-time.)
</p>
<p>Infocom, 1982. Excerpt created in 2000 by Nick Montfort using a<br />
port of Deadline to the Inform language. Port to Inform by Volker Lanz,<br />
1999. Inform by Graham Nelson, 1993-1999. Excerpt created and used with<br />
permission of Activison, Inc.</p>
<p>
Russotto, Matthew.<br /><span class="booktitle">ZPlet</span><br />
1996. Java interpreter for Z-code, used to run the<br /><span class="booktitle">Deadline</span><br />
excerpt. Used with permission of Matthew Russotto.
</p>
<p>
Weizenbaum, Joseph.<br /><span class="booktitle">Eliza</span><br />
1964-66. Java version created and made freely available by<br />
Charles Hayden, based on a 1983 Macintosh version by Charles Hayden.
</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/chomsky-hierarchy">Chomsky hierarchy</a>, <a href="/tags/hypertext">hypertext</a>, <a href="/tags/cybertext">cybertext</a>, <a href="/tags/aarseth">aarseth</a>, <a href="/tags/deadline">deadline</a>, <a href="/tags/adventure-international">adventure international</a>, <a href="/tags/infocom">infocom</a>, <a href="/tags/zork">zork</a>, <a href="/tags/turing-machines">turing machines</a>, <a href="/tags/algorithm">algorithm</a>, <a href="/tags/eliza">eliza</a>, <a href="/tags/racter">racter</a>, <a href="/tags/ergodics">ergodics</a>, <a href="/tags/bruce-boston">bruce boston</a>, <a href="/tags/italo-calvino">italo calvino</a>, <a href="/tags/if-winters-night-traveller">if on a winter&#039;s night a traveller</a>, <a href="/tags/james-joyce">james joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/cortazar">cortazar</a>, <a href="/tags/hopscotch">hopscotch</a>, <a href="/tags/kat">kat</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator662 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comReturn to Twilighthttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/endconstruction/notanend
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Dave Ciccoricco</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2002-01-21</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="epigraph">
Having been here once here now once again.<br /><br />
Magdalena,<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight, A Symphony</span>
</p>
<p class="epigraph">
To repeat evidently implies resemblance, yet can we speak of resemblance unless there is difference?<br /><br />
Peter Brooks
</p>
<p>
I was sitting on my screened porch in the afternoon sunshine, cocktail in hand, the LCD screen of my laptop casting a pleasant glare in my face. I had, for whatever reason, decided that my reading of Michael Joyce’s latest hypertext fiction had come to a resting point, and it was time to mull over some recent criticism. Scanning through some online articles, my keyboard fearing for its life as my drink swept precariously over it, I settled on<br /><a class="outbound" href="http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~koskimaa/twilight.htm">a title</a>.
</p>
<p>
Several paragraphs later, its author struck me with a sobering thought: “We really have to consider the question, if hyperfiction [has], in the ten years from Joyce’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span><br />
to<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span><br />
come to the end of its road.” I promptly choked on a mouthful of crushed ice. The end? Really? The comment was disconcerting, especially given all this hyper-rhetoric of open-endedness. Just moments before, the road had appeared to me to stretch infinitely into the horizon. And I was pacing myself. After all, what’s the rush?
</p>
<p>There is no doubt that we are in an incredible hurry to theorize our literature and our literary epochs in the same breath, updating discourse as we update software, and it is always entertaining to see how many “post’s” one can pin on the postmodern donkey. Of course, hindsight was never handmaid to theory, but, in our haste to move on, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand what it is we seek to leave behind. As Diane Greco suggests in a recent Eastgate interview, “Defining a movement as ‘over’ is often just a way to control the terms of a discourse currently in flux.” Meanwhile, as the idea of digitally inspired art forms grows ever larger than itself, we may be neglecting something of the works themselves.</p>
<p>Granted, in speaking of the road’s end, Raine Koskimaa considers not “extinction,” but rather a “shift,” perhaps toward virtual reality worlds or narrative storyworlds. And he may be right still; clearly Joyce’s latest medley of media is one indication of formal trends. But in the midst of change, there is obvious continuity in hypertext fiction. This continuity, moreover, is inclusive of its form rather than exclusive to it, for it reflects more dynamic aesthetic forces driven by our literary machines. We can work toward a practical aesthetic of hypertext fiction, then, by discussing continuity in the midst of change, and by speaking critically of each work before speaking belatedly of an entire genre.</p>
<p>
This essay looks back on a single work of hypertext, Michael Joyce’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight, A Symphony</span><br />
(1997). In fact, it looks back on looking back, by offering one account of how the notion of narrative return provides one foundation for a discussion of a hypertextual aesthetic. More specifically, it demonstrates the notion of narrative return as it manifests itself formally and contextually in Joyce’s work. In this sense, it gestures away from formal innovation as an indicator of change, and toward a discussion that engages formal qualities as they work (and play) in concert with contextual ones.
</p>
<h2>Magdalena’s Return</h2>
<p>
<span class="booktitle">Twilight, A Symphony</span><br />
is a story of returns. In his “lyrical elegy,” Joyce introduces journalist Hugh Colin Enright, who child-naps his infant son and hides away from his estranged wife on the shores of Pleasant Lake. There, Hugh befriends an eccentric Polish refugee and his wife, Magda. Almost a decade later, Magda, suffering from a rare form of cancer, seeks out Hugh and begs for his help in her macabre search for the Twilight Doctor, who she believes will assist her in her death. When their search fails, Hugh agrees to help Magda end her own life.
</p>
<p>Broadly speaking, Magda’s return to Hugh frames this story. As the introductory node tells us, “The beginning of the story in the present moment finds these two talking, rather operatically (or perhaps in the way of a Socratic dialogue), on a screen porch in Spring. Magdalena may be in remission or simply very near death and silver with pain” ([Our story so far]). Beyond this node, two further nodes, [here] and [there], establish the idea of return as a central theme. Neither assumes the distinct point of view of Hugh or Magda; instead, the narration weaves musings and memories peculiar to each character with a state of reverie common to both. In [here], a contemplation of corporeality suggests that the narration focuses, if only briefly, on the thoughts of Magda, her own body flushed with disease:</p>
<p class="longQuotation">Having been here once here once again. One could actually reach and touch where in the air there before the eyes the center of the body had been bound by bone staves, heavy kettle of innards slung below corseted bellows; reach where once a winged shoulder moved at eye level, so surely there one could lay one’s head against the scent of the past itself, nestle in memory, cradle recurrence between curved palms…I tread here once and am once again. What could this mean? [here]</p>
<p>Similarly, moments of reverie in the node [there] seem to belong to Hugh. In this passage, Hugh observes couples passing by, “solicitous and tender to one another.” One man “touches the broad freckled back of his big-breasted handsome wife; their child returns from the dark water.” Meanwhile, “another woman whose plump arms seem distinct from her… returns from the long dock with her dark-haired mustachioed handsome husband and gently slips her hand into his” ([there]). Hugh’s observations reveal his preoccupation with family and, more specifically, his yearning for scenes that cannot be his own.</p>
<p>The node continues with Hugh questioning the “purpose [of] all this intricate care and mindless passing of time,” and concludes with an evocation of Magda, “the fragrance of her returning.” The phrase may refer to their present-tense reunion on the porch - Magda may have approached him at that moment in mid-reverie. But “the fragrance of her returning” takes on another meaning after we learn that Hugh’s attempt to assist her death has failed. In other words, her returning refers specifically to his memory of her unexpectedly revived in the hotel room after the attempted assisted suicide. This explains Hugh’s next recollection, a question Magda puts to him repeatedly; and repeatedly it serves as one of the unifying refrains of the story: “Why didn’t you let me die?” ([there]).</p>
<p>Clearly, the two have a shared history, and though their reminiscence “in the present moment” gives some indication of their past, readers must find paths that will return them to this history. In this sense, their reunion cues our departure. We can recall Peter Brooks’ comment that “narratives both tell of desire - typically present some story of desire - and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signification” (37). In any fiction, then, the reader’s desire is aroused, whereas that of the characters (in this case Magda’s or Hugh’s) is told. Both drive the narrative plot forward under Brooks’ idea of textual erotics.</p>
<p>
Brooks’ model, however, will not take us very far in hypertext, for rarely can we be sure of the direction in which we are headed. In<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span>, specifically, forward progression of a plot simply does not occur. At first, it might appear that Magda’s desire for death, the arch-metaphor for closure, drives this hypertext.<br /><cite id="note_1">Freud’s psychology would suggest that our drive for closure and return are congruent concepts; specifically, Magda’s death drive is simply the desire to return to an earlier state. But even if they are rooted in the same instinctual drive, these concepts operate quite differently with regard to our expectations of narrative.</cite><br />
Hence, our desire to return to the past experiences of Hugh and Magda runs parallel but counter to Magda’s desire to die. Her desire, then, provides the most obvious movement toward a conclusion, and, following Brooks’ lead, we seek unswervingly to predicate this bit of narrative plot.
</p>
<p>But here we see Brooks’ model as too straightforward, so to speak - its linear thrust always directed toward some end, or “signifying totality.” His repetition seems to occur along the same axis, on a singular vector temporarily reversed. That is, repetition enacts “a calling back or a turning back” of the text, as if forward and backward were the only two directions available in narrative. Such a model might describe the mechanics of print texts, in which an “ineluctable page-turning chain” (to recall Coover’s phrase) offers at least a fixed point of reference for plot. Hypertext, by contrast, assumes a form that suggests not only movement forward and backward, but also above and below or perhaps inside and out, for not only are nodes linked “adjacently” to one another, but also they may contain one another in a system of embedded levels of text.</p>
<p>
Thematically, Joyce himself saw the story as moving in different trajectories: “east toward life (though in the past) and west toward death (though in the future)” ([Our story so far]). And his figurative conception approximates the same movement above and below: “Above these there is something like a dream or mind, a set of sometimes fragmentary, sometimes speculative linkages (with their own arcs). Below, in something approximating the movement of the shifting text, is the beginning of the story” ([Our story so far]). But in the story, this western arch toward death is by no means a forward progression toward a conclusion, and it does not terminate in the “full predication” described by Brooks. Though it would appear that the aptly named node [the end] might offer at least a quasi-ending to the narrative web, it enacts another, quite dramatic, return instead: “When it was over he wasn’t clear (he never has been) whether he panicked or simply misjudged how much it took to die (he knew one day she would ask him)”; the paramedics and the constable “watched her return in giddy silence” [(the end)]. Clearly, “the end” in this story establishes its beginning: “Why didn’t you let me die?” The plot of<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span>, then, (in so far as it has one) emphasizes not a progression toward Brooks’ “signifying totality” but rather its perpetual deferral. In turn, it subverts the conclusion enacted by a linear plot in both its form and content.
</p>
<h2>A Return to Gould</h2>
<p>
Both of Joyce’s hypertexts subvert our expectation of closure. But in<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span>, Joyce’s equation of narrative closure to death itself is overt, and it allows him to embed the quality of endlessness in the thematic framework of the story. Again,<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span><br />
tells the story of a subverted closure, just as the formal qualities of hypertext novels subvert the narrative closure we associate with the printed book. Koskimaa notes another difference between the two works. In “From Afternoon till Twilight,” a review published in<br /><span class="booktitle">ebr</span>, he argues that, unlike<br /><span class="booktitle">Afternoon</span>,<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span><br />
“is not even attempting to offer different stories but rather different readings of the same story.” In this sense, we can approach<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span><br />
literally as a symphony - “a story in variations.” That is, each new variation enacts a repetition of an original melody, a return to the same music albeit in the context of difference.
</p>
<p>
Joyce resurrects Glenn Gould and his Goldberg Variations to exploit this theme. “Gould or his ghost is, as you know, a character in - and something of an organizing principle of -<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span>,” he writes in an email interview with the<br /><span class="journaltitle">Atlantic online</span>. As we are told in “Our story so far,” while Hugh and Magda sit talking, they are listening to one of Glenn Gould’s two recordings of the<br /><i>Goldberg Variations</i>, recordings which link them in interesting ways. (Magdalena was born in June, 1955, the month and year of the first recording; they met at Pleasant Lake in the summer of 1981, just after Gould recorded the variations again in the same studio on East 30th Street in New York City). The music marks a return to their own memory of this first meeting, after the two realize that they are both on the run. During the first meeting, Hugh scans Magda’s modest home and hears “the clatter of rain on the roof in the ceilingless room mixed with the hiss of noisy Bach from a terrible eight-track tape player with stained decals of Sesame Street figures on its grimy yellow plastic sides” ([twos]). Joyce’s mention of an eight track player suggests that the version of Bach Hugh hears is indeed the first (pre-digital) recording of Gould’s<br /><i>Goldberg Variations</i>. Although the detail appears trivial, it is one small piece of the vast fabric of interconnections that unite Hugh, Magda, and the music of Gould. In fact, the story of the<br /><i>Goldberg Variations</i><br />
is itself a story of returns.
</p>
<p>
Legend has it that Count Keyserling, Russian ambassador to the Saxon court in Dresden, had as his musician-in-service a young boy named Johann Gottlieb Goldberg. Keyserling is said to have had a terrible case of insomnia and, in an effort to find something to ease the long hours of the night, he commissioned a work from the reputable composer Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was to compose music that the young Goldberg, also a Bach protégé, could perform during the Count’s hours of sleeplessness - perhaps even lull him to sleep. The result was the<br /><i>Goldberg Variations</i>, though the origin of the aria upon which they were based remains another source of debate. The only certainty is that, sometime in the year 1725, the line notes were recorded in a notebook belonging to Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena (who shares her name with the female protagonist of<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span>). Furthermore, at the time of the composition the young performer was roughly 12 years old, and some dispute that the boy could have handled the technical complexities of the work. This, of course, simply compounds the legend.
</p>
<p>
Like Goldberg, Glenn Gould, born over two hundred years later, was a musical prodigy. He was said to have read music before he read words, and when Gould first recorded the<br /><i>Variations</i><br />
on piano in 1955, the event marked his musical debut at age 22. The recording not only brought instant fame to Gould, but also popularized the<br /><i>Variations</i><br />
themselves. Before Gould, the music was used primarily for performance, typically by harpsichord, and few earlier recordings exist. Gould is known for his eccentricities, among these his disdain for concert halls and live performances (he once expressed the desire to do away with what he thought of as the reprehensible ritual of applause). Nevertheless, his decision to withdraw from live performance in 1964, not ten years after his debut, came as a shock and disappointment to those devoted to his music. Gould continued to compose, record, and even write essays on a wide range of topics, but never returned to public performance. He did, however, return to the<br /><i>Goldberg Variations</i>, adding more mystery to a man who re-recorded the work that made him famous over thirty years before. Though he completed the project, Gould died after suffering a stroke less than a year later, which not only kept his mystery intact, but also conferred on that last recording an ethereal, even mythical status.
</p>
<p>
Gould’s second recording of the<br /><i>Variations</i>, then, marks the most definitive return of his artistic career. In his own “return to Gould” in an essay of the same name, Bruce W. Powe writes of the 1981 recording: “There is serenity and ecstasy, introspection and grandiosity in the last interpretation of the Goldberg Variations. Gould’s return to this piece was poignant and ambiguous - a piece transformed by the spectre-visionary of the recording studio. His version is both a farewell and a rethinking” (Powe, “Return”). The romantic assumption, of course, is that Gould foresaw his own death, which heightens the “haunting” feeling commonly ascribed to the 1981 work. Powe himself goes so far to say that the assumption is “tempting” but in his introduction he too refers to the “haunting, darkened second version,” and later writes, “It is the aria, the autumnal air he offers, that makes him seem death-haunted, neurotically charged, even ill” (Powe, “Return”).<br /><cite id="note_2">By some accounts Gould suffered from chronic afflictions; by other accounts he was a hypochondriac; by all accounts he took an incredible amount of pills.</cite><br />
Hence, if we recall the detail of Magda’s eight-track player, we see that Gould’s return to the Variations serves as a backdrop to Joyce’s story, an ever-present source of its haunting tone. Indeed, Gould gives us much more than the background music for<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span>: his ghost underscores the ominous reason for Magda’s return to Hugh.
</p>
<h2>Digital Gould</h2>
<p>
There were, of course, more mundane motivations for Gould’s return to the<br /><italic>Variations</italic>. Fascinated with studio technology, the dawning of digital media encouraged him to undertake another recording in 1981. In this sense, Gould’s interest in the power of technology to recreate art makes his work an apt metaphor for Joyce. As Gould wrote, “In the electronic age the art of music will become much more viably a part of our lives, much less an ornament to them, and that it will consequently change them much more profoundly” (cited in Powe). Indeed, for Joyce, Gould’s vision serves as a prototype for creativity in the digital age, even though the two worked in different media. At the same time, it can be said that Joyce’s assimilation of sound into his hypertext (not to mention images and video) clearly indicates his attempt to show how these media can merge to enhance, rather than obscure, a narrative object.
</p>
<p>
Gould also marveled at the joint effort involved in studio recording, thus anticipating a collaborative ethic of creativity that many hypertextualists regard as a central premise of their art. As Gould wrote over two decades ago, “Electronic transmission has already inspired a new concept of multiple authorship responsibility in which the specific functions of the composer, the performer, and indeed the consumer overlap” (cited in Powe, “Return”). To underline Gould’s emphasis on the expanded role of the listener/consumer made possible by digital recording, Joyce cites him directly in<br /><span class="Booktitle">Twilight</span>: “All the music that has ever been can now become a background against which the impulse to make listener-supplied connections is the new foreground” Glenn Gould<br /><span class="booktitle">The Prospects of Recording</span><br />
([Prospects]).
</p>
<h2>Mythical Returns</h2>
<p>
If Joyce identifies himself implicitly with Gould as an artist, then he extends this identification explicitly to the characters in his fiction. Indeed, more than ghosts in passing, both Gould and Goldberg enter the lives of Joyce’s characters as mythical personae. For example, Hugh’s son Obie shows signs of early musical genius: “We return home last night to find that Obie has composed a song, an ornate and visually beautiful child scrawl scoring a twelve bar sonata of two contrasting sections, replete with dotted notes, crescendi e dimuendi, tonics, and a haunting minor feeling” ([(son)ata]). The same “minor feeling” that haunts Obie’s sonata haunts all of<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span>, for it refers to the G-minor that commences the aria of the<br /><i>Goldberg Variations</i>.
</p>
<p>Readers hear the same note, as a sound byte, when they open two of the nodes. In [songs], for instance, we hear the G-minor of a single piano stroke as we begin to read of Hugh and Magda searching for the Twilight Doctor from the shores of the small Canadian town of Marathon. Toward the end of the node, it is clear that the two characters have heard something as well: “We search the seam of the water and sky for any light, whether an oar boat’s running lamps or an evening star. There is no light, and yet we think we hear something” ([songs]). If we default, we hear a different note as the node opens, but unlike that of a piano, the sound is that of “distant klaxon” from a ship. The node begins with a direct address in a meta-fictional acknowledgement of the sound: “There. Hear that? Somewhere far on the water, bleating metallic G-sharp modulating to A-flat, its dull echo lingering on the silent edge of twilight” ([Calliope at Marathon]). But Hugh reads the ship’s horn as music nonetheless, and we can only assume that the ghost of Gould is again present, especially given Joyce’s allusion to Calliope, which evokes the Greek muse of poetry as well as the keyboard instrument of the same name.</p>
<p>
The G-minor, furthermore, not only commences the aria of the<br /><i>Goldberg Variations</i><br />
but also concludes it. Hence, Joyce uses the same sound byte to open his pseudo-ending at [the end]. As Magda slips into unconsciousness, shrouded in her “death masque,” Hugh sees her, ironically, as a chrysalis. After Hugh phones the police and realizes Magda has not actually died, he removes the shroud in a moment of symbolic rebirth. Here, the narrative point of view shifts from Hugh to Magda, at times indeterminately. But at this moment the mythical identification of Hugh with Goldberg is most explicit: “Her eyes said why didn’t you let me die. Yet it wasn’t so bitter as it sounds. Not so sad. She knew he loved her…. Your name is Johann Gottlieb and I am the Countess Chrysalis” ([the end]). The irony, or more appropriately, the variation, is that Hugh has failed to lull his Countess to sleep.
</p>
<p>
Goldberg and Gould, however, provide only one mythical genealogy for Joyce’s protagonist. In fact, Hugh’s name marks one of many returns to the work of another Joyce who, despite his musical talents as one of the best Irish tenors of his time, is better known for his prose. Specifically, we are encouraged to read Hugh Colin Enwright as another possible incarnation of the protagonist of James Joyce’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Finnegans Wake</span>: Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. The initials H.C.E. invite the comparison of Hugh to an everyman, just as James Joyce’s Earwicker sounds the universal appeal of “Here Comes Everybody.” Hence, we can read Hugh as the embodiment of any number of mythical and archetypal figures who live in the past, present and future, just as Earwicker fuses together folk hero Tim Finnegan, the gallant Tristan of medieval Irish lore, the legendary giant Finn MacCool, Huck Finn, and Humpty Dumpty to name a few. By creating a homonym for “you” with Hugh, Michael Joyce adds you, the reader, to this list of meta-fictional characters, a move that recalls Moulthrop’s character Boris Urquhart in<br /><span class="booktitle">Victory Garden</span><br />
- commonly known in the story as “U.”
</p>
<p>
Thus, Michael Joyce affords his own H.C.E. the permeable, manifold, and at times all-encompassing identity of his predecessor, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker of<br /><span class="booktitle">Finnegans Wake</span>. But<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span><br />
marks a return to James Joyce on a broader scale. If, as Koskimaa suggests,<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span><br />
presents different versions of the same story, then we must consider that story as a variation itself - which, of course, would be a variation of a variation and so on. In other words, Joyce flirts with the notion that all texts ever written share a common thread - that they are somehow essentially linked and originate from a common source. It is an idea expressed succinctly in Calvino’s<br /><span class="booktitle">If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller</span><br />
(1979) with the “Father of Stories,” a blind and illiterate old man who is said to “uninterruptingly tell stories that take place in countries and times completely unknown to him… According to some, [he] is the universal source of narrative material, the primordial magma from which the individual manifestations of each writer develop” (117). The structure of Calvino’s novel itself is a reflection of this theme, for each chapter is only the beginning of a story, and the reader continually fails to follow any one thread. The only framing story is that of a reader (also the meta-fictional “you”) who is continually frustrated in the attempt to finish reading a novel, much like the experience of a hypertext reader with all too conventional expectations of closure. Nevertheless, despite the divergent threads of Calvino’s chapters, we see certain patterns converge in a story overtly conscious of its narrative design.
</p>
<p>
<span class="booktitle">Twilight</span><br />
replays some of the most basic archetypal stories, such as the classic quest (for the Twilight Doctor) and the death and rebirth cycle (of Magda). But besides this, Joyce overtly encourages us to read his story as nothing more than a variation of an archetypal story: “There is only one story of time and space and it is constantly retold: someone far away tries to come home” ([you’ll sees]). Joyce repeatedly refers to Homer’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Odyssey</span><br />
in<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span>, positioning it as the original story of return and, by implication, its author the potential Father of Stories. Similarly, Hugh C. Enwright seeks out the origins of his own story: “In my mind I keep trying to locate the one event, the one time, that single occurrence led to this; and each time there’s another before it” ([ours]).
</p>
<p>
Magda, however, simply chides him for his abstractions, “You see now it’s you who is being philosophical…Aristotle’s causes and personal effects in a zip-lock bag. No one believes in the beginning anymore. No more what’s before” ([ours]). It would seem that Joyce takes a cue from Magda as well, for instead of miring in metaphysical questions of origin, he greets the prospect of literary paternity with a sense of play: “There’s only been one book ever written and it was a Greek wrote it - though some say he was Armenian, Asia Minor, Greek-Jew or Jew Greek or something - and then an Irishman rewrote it and everybody else kept trying” ([this computer]). In another sequence, a convoluted knock-knock joke involving Umberto Eco spawns the interjection: “Who do you think you are, James Joyce?” ([Housa hoser]). Hence, if Michael Joyce, like Stephen in<br /><span class="booktitle">A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</span>, were to “forge in the smithy of [his] soul the uncreated conscience of [his] race,” he assures us that he would do so with a wry smile (and, we can hope, with some better jokes).
</p>
<h2>Refrain, Repetition, and Return</h2>
<p>
In the midst of these thematic and mythical returns, we are reminded that narrative repetition occurs on many levels, including that of language itself. We can recall Brooks’ description of “rhyme, alliteration, assonance, meter, refrain, and all the mnemonic elements of literature and indeed most of its tropes, [which] are in some manner repetitions that take us back to the text, that allow the ear, the eye, the mind to make connections, conscious or unconscious, between different textual moments…” (99). Similarly, Mark Bernstein writes of hypertext: “Repetition itself is a valuable cue, for repetition always signals intent and artifice. The repetition need not be complete and literal, for a writer may gain the effect of repetition by repeating some aspects - position, typography, color - while varying others” (Bernstein,<br /><span class="booktitle">Hypertext Gardens</span>). Joyce’s textual refrains, which appear in several different nodes and often in slightly different ways, demonstrate this form of return.
</p>
<p>For example, Joyce composes a series of five nodes he titles “ekphrastics,” a form of highly descriptive poetry designed to evoke acute visual images. Though they are numbered, the segments, like memories, do not link accordingly or in any given order. The text of each differs, but all five include the same concluding refrain: “This is how it will be to die.” The [first ekphrastic] details a memory of “crossing in fog…the Hudson from Beacon to Newburgh, the bridge lights are feathery halos” ([first ekphrastic]). The node includes a sound byte that is identical to the “metallic G-sharp” that opens [Calliope at Marathon]. This enacts an audible return, and we associate the “dull echo” heard by Hugh and Magda with the same sound Hugh hears while crossing the Hudson as a child. The memory, of course, belongs to Hugh in its fictional frame; that is, the sound enacts a return at the level of his consciousness. Nonetheless, the node concludes with the refrain, set apart from the text that details the memory: “Surrender: this is how it will be to die” [first ekphrastic]. Here, Hugh’s “surrender” refers to the nightmarish experience of crossing the Hudson at night as a child.</p>
<p>The remaining ekphrastics, furthermore, amend the opening word of the refrain in such a way as to reflect the sentiment of the memory evoked. The third ekphrastic tells of Magda’s suffering, her “marrow dulled with morphine yet bone raw and in pain beyond pain.” Its refrain follows: “Sweetly screaming: this is how it will be to die” [third ekphrastic]. Joyce thus uses the same refrain to unite different memories, allowing the reader to enact a return to the same theme (that of death) in the context of difference.</p>
<p>All in all, a narrative composed of hyperlinks and nodes facilitates textual returns in the most obvious sense, and readers enact these returns in a manner unique to each individual reading. In this sense, all nodes are potential refrains, for the meaning of each depends on its location in a narrative neighborhood, which is of course in constant flux. When we revisit a node in a new locale, with different nodes “semantically adjacent” to it, that node undergoes a transformation, and ultimately a series of transformations that compound its meaning in relation to the larger narrative network. Joyce himself refers to the same process as “successive attending,” which he sees as a more accurate description of how we read hypertext in a meaningful way. The use of the Return key to default, moreover, is the most literal reminder of our return to pre-existent narrative paths, at times repeating familiar nodes in the process. Each return does not have to be a re-reading per se; rather, it can act as a simple point of reference - as a breadcrumb left in the maze. More than simply encouraging readers to revisit text in an ever-changing context, then, these returns allow us to construct visualizations of the narrative structure. I refer here to cognitive maps, but less to those provided by the digital interface and more to those that rely on human memory.</p>
<p>
Repetition is a vital tool of orientation in any landscape, and hyperspace is no exception. In another refrain that unifies his essay, “A Memphite Topography,” Joyce continually asks us to “Imagine a city of text.” In<br /><span class="booktitle">Twilight</span>, the same city remains “consciously unfinished, fragmentary, open…unfinished in the way that death unfinishes us all” ([Our story so far]). Hence, we must always envision a figure in motion, with each hypertextual return affirming its movement. As Bernstein writes, “Recurrence is the main way that people perceive a hypertext structure, the way they learn what contours they may follow and how those contours may change as the document evolves.” And although these contours continue well beyond the limits prescribed by a printed book, many writers have shown that storytelling itself continues without the familiar convention of narrative closure.
</p>
<p>It may still be up to readers, however, to forgo attempts to re-enact this convention conclusively in hypertextual form, and to realize that a hypertext does not lack closure any more than a traditional novel lacks the possibility for return. True, the notion of the endless narrative is by no means unique to hypertext, and the fact that it predates digital literature (both in form and content - “re: Joyce”) is further evidence against the argument - symptomatic of technological determinists - that innovations in form always drive innovation in content. Again, this drive is reciprocal, and, as both a formal and thematic device, the hypertextual return is a poignant reminder of this. In short, the notion of return is not new to literature, but rather it is newly dominant in the literature of hypertext. And if the story of return is indeed archetypal, then Joyce returns to the same story albeit in the in the context of difference - a difference that is digital. After all, a reading practice that relies on hyperlinking is unique to digital literature, and it is on these grounds that literary hypertext fosters its own aesthetic.</p>
<p>But it’s about time I slapped shut the jaws of my laptop. The twilight tells me it’s getting late, and the LCD glare on my face is becoming a ghostlike glow. In the same light, I watch as details fade in the distance, giving way to others that come clearly into view nearby. It is indeed a graceful transition. But it is, above all, a slow and deliberate movement, to be studied and enjoyed in its own time, before the coming of next dawn.</p>
<h2></h2>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/michael-joyce">michael joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/james-joyce">james joyce</a>, <a href="/tags/peter-brooks">peter brooks</a>, <a href="/tags/diane-greco">diane greco</a>, <a href="/tags/glenn-gould">glenn gould</a>, <a href="/tags/goldberg-variations">goldberg variations</a>, <a href="/tags/bruce-powe">bruce powe</a>, <a href="/tags/prospects-recording">the prospects of recording</a>, <a href="/tags/italo-calvino">italo calvino</a>, <a href="/tags/raine-koskimaa">raine koskimaa</a>, <a href="/tags/mark-bernstein">mark bernstein</a>, <a href="/tags/end-construction">end construction</a>, <a href="/tags/poe">poe</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator641 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com